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From my experiences, only games from about HL2 on support dual-core, quad-core being utilized either badly or not at all. When you talk about Photoshop, CAD, encoding video and so forth, the situation improves.

Dual-core, four-socket Opteron SLI workstation goodness:

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/articles/viewar ticle.jsp?id=33905

The 17 inch monitors tend to cost $179-$199 at minimum. At Fry Electronics, they START at $300. There's a good chunk of your $500. The Dell comes with keyboard and mouse (that's about $20 - $30 there). The hard drive on the Dell is twice as big. There's another $20 or $30 or so. The Dell burns DVD's, while the $494 Mac Mini does not. Another $20 - $30. There are probably other things as well: these Macs tend to be stripped-down compared to even the typical low-end PC. There: you've had to add about between $400 and $500 worth of extras to the $500 MacMini to get it to equal the $500 Dell.

The Dell has a Pentium 4 (not a celeron). It actually is faster. The "Mac processor is slower but is really faster" is part of the Apple sales pitch, and has little credibility outside of the Apple sales realm

Here is one of many comparisons:
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm

The best ones are the ones not offered by system bigots or those selling Apples or certain PC brands.

The MacMini would be a bargain at $300, but not at $494. The premium is still high. If Apple allowed cloning, companies would quickly say "Why sell such a stripped-out machine at $494 when we can sell it for half that?"

I got a Dell 2001FP which uses the LG.Philips LCD LM201U04 for the LCD. A pre-production review can be found http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1918.

Of particular interest is this quote from the second page of the review:

"The screen itself is a very nice LG.Philips LCD LM201U04. This is perhaps the first true 16ms 24-bit LCD panel commercially produced and doesn't rely on over-inflated contrast ratio and brightness numbers to draw attention to itself. We will go into more detail about the panel later on."

This link:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1918&p=5

Talks about true 24-bit colour rather than 18-bit colour.

Finally, though the review points out a startlingly unacceptable 5 dead pixels it was a preproduction unit. I have none thus far, but that is always a concern with LCDs of course.

Another excellent LCD may be the Sony SDM-P232W/B for those with a larger budget. Review:

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/articles/viewar ticle.jsp?id=20358

Why can television/advertising companies prevent PVRs like TiVo from having features to skip advertising in their products when it is perfectly legal to store the data and fast forward or rewind?

The answer is that they can't. At least not in the analog signal that is broadcast over the air or cable that is your TV signal. However, they may make deals with digital providers not to provide a pure digital signal unless there is a way to block the skipping of commercials. Much like officially licensed DVD players won't skip the commercials and the FBI warnings if the disc creator instructs the player not too.

I've heard talk of restricting HDTV signals, because some consider it stealing.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if commercials change their format on TV. Can you imagine pop-ups like on VH1's Pop-up-videos or banner ads like the current stock tickers?

pc's have been faster at photoshop for a while now.....

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/rev iews/cw_macvspciii.htm

pc's have been faster at photoshop for a while now.....

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/rev iews/cw_macvspciii.htm

Except that's all marchitecture. Go to the Apple site, G5s start at (START at) $1999. Meanwhile, go to boxxtech. Their Opteron based systems start at $1950. The Opteron can perform every task a $600 PC from Best Buy can without a problem. If the G5 is a desktop computer, then by the benchmark of price and flexibility, you better believe that the Opteron is to.

DigitalVideoEditing had a nice interview with Apple that reveals they marketed their computer as "the first 64-bit desktop" because they did not think the Opteron was 64-bit. They also have a very hard time explaining why the Opteron systems from Boxx aren't desktops, a Clinton-esque "it depends on what the word 'is' is." Read it here

See: http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2003/06_jun/fea tures/cw_macg5_interview.htm. Funny stuff.

[excerpt:]
DMN: Now, you're saying it's the first 64-bit desktop machine. But isn't there an Opteron dual-processor machine? It shipped on June 4th. BOXX Technologies shipped it. It has an Opteron 244 in it.

Rubinstein: Uh...

Akrout: It's not a desktop.

DMN: That's a desktop unit.

Akrout: It depends on what you call a desktop, now.

---

S

A single 2GHz G5 easily beats a single whatever-the-fast-one-is P4, and finishes so close to a Xeon that it's essentially too close to call.

Remember NASA? They were benchmarking a custom-written PPC app for fluid dynamics. It was hand-tuned to exploit AltiVec for floating-point vector computations. It showed that an equivalently-clocked G5 ran about 30% faster than a P4. If this is what you're going on, I'm laughing. The instructions-per-cycle on a processor means nothing -- P4s run at a significantly faster clock. The problem is that the fastest G5 available on-market runs at 2.0 Ghz, and the fastest available P4 on-market runs at 3.2 Ghz. So the G5 loses if we measure by absolute fastest possible speed. Perhaps we should use a value metric instead? The best bang-for-the-buck you can get in a G5 from Apple is their $1999 1.6Ghz model. If I pick out a new P4 desktop at Dell using the Apple price as a guide, I can get a 3.0 Ghz desktop for less, which runs about half again as fast as the Mac...*with* a monitor, which Apple doesn't include, plus a bunch of other goodies, for over a hundred dollars less.

Wrongo, dimwit. The "overwhelming number of times" (speak English much?) it's I/O. Your computer spends more time waiting than it does working. This has been true for years and years now.

Heh. All right, you're right -- I wasn't very clear. I was thinking of long-running tasks (which *are* generally CPU-bound), not simply browsing through your filesystem -- the latency there isn't going to kill anyone. Trust me, you don't want to change the competition to I/O latency rather than CPU speed -- OS X is an extremely heavy RAM consumer, and Apple charges a notoriously high premium on RAM.

Is this a metaphor, or are you just an idiot? You know that Quake 3 isn't CPU bound, right?

It certainly was on my computer when I played it. I'm sure it's possible to build a system where that's not the case, but given that the rate of graphic chipset speed increases significantly outpaces that of CPU speed increases, that's a pretty weak claim you're making if you're considering an ordinary old computer.

You also know that nobody gives a flying fuck about Quake 3 frame rates, right? I mean, you do realize that the people who hang out in apple.slashdot.org actually do this for a living, and are more interested in Final Cut Pro or Logic performance than silly games. RIGHT?

You do realize that the majority of people on apple.slashdot.org (or any slashdot subdomain) are under 20 and care more about games than Final Cut Pro, right?

But, hell, since I've made assumptions to favor you all the way through here, I'll do so again. We'll go with your DV folks -- want to read their opinion? Apple's PR people are full of it WRT performance.

That doesn't mean that the G5 systems are bad, as I pointed out above. They're a great choice if you use Macs. But claims of them stomping x86 boxes are simply not true, and folks simply repeating false claims that Apple's made are not doing anyone any favors.

Why do you need more than 4Gb of memory, today?

It's been done

Getting increasingly common, and doesn't really push the price up that much

unix

Free

Also been done

Also Free

All you need is a burner. The rest is free. Apple are just using mass-market drives anyway.

So, let's see what that sort of hardware normally retails for...

Five minutes with google located this review, of a similar PC available for $3300... in 2001. So Apple are selling kit at the prices the rest of the world were using two years ago.

Applying Moore's law (combined with the knowledge that in the hardware industry, prices stay fairly constant while performance increases), we can conclude that this is a little over twice a suitable price for equivalent value. Somebody with more time than me is invited to track down a current workstation price.

And that jives with my experience of Apple, too. Equivalent (often identical, once you remove the ugly translucent plastic cover) hardware to what everybody else is selling, at approximately twice the price.

...who just assemble components and sell them as expensive boxes. How does that benefit us, exactly? It's not like they invented most of the hardware in those things. A significant chunk of it came from IBM, and most of the rest is just normal retail hardware (hard drives, dvd drives, network chips, usb controllers, graphics chips...).

Give me a break...

How about giving you a clue instead?

Ok, that clears it all up, since he is an asshole, then the Opteron machines that 'various' small manufacturers have released no longer exist. Poof, magic of an asshole reviewer can do miracles. Geesh.

Go read Charlie's commentary on Apple's announcement of the G5. To sum it up: you could order an Opteron from some small no-name manufacturer at the time of the announcement, and Apple didn't use the bestest best PC SPEC numbers obtained with a highly optimized compilers for the comparisons, therefore Jobs is a sniviling, slimy liar. He also grumples about how Apple was being a PR whore, and that AMD has "considerably more credibility than Apple", ignoring the fact that AMD markets its chips with some made up number, rather than how man megahertz it has. So yes, Charlie White is still an asshole.

BTW, considering market share, wouldn't Apple be considered a 'small manufacturer'? Hmm...

What an ignorant thing to say. Rather than comparing Apple's marketshare against ALL pc manufacturers COMBINED, why not compare Apple to Dell or HP? Not to mention the fact that they're one of the few companies that hasn't lost scads of money since the bubble burst. Saying Apple is a 'small manufacturer' would be like saying Honda has a small marketshare compared to Ford, GM, Daimler-Chrysler, Toyota, etc etc combined.

Get over it, the G5 is not, and will not be the first 64bit Desktop Computer.

They never said desktop computer, they said personal computer. If you check out the BOXX website, all their systems are built and marketed as either workstations or as rendering nodes. So unless BOXX starts selling to the consumer market by August or Dell throws some Opterons in their Dimension series, Apple will have a perfectly legit claim to have the first 64 bit personal computer.

WindowsXP for Itanium (Both a real 64bit OS, and a real 64bit processor) have been available for over a year now, in fact I think WindowsXP 64, is approaching its two year release date.

In no way could the Itaniums currently be considered for personal computers. But hey, if you want to buy an Itanium for a lot more money that will perform far more slowly than a P4 or an Athlon, be my guest. And I wonder why it would take Microsoft so long to release a 64 bit version of XP, considering they had NT running on Alphas, PowerPC's and I think Sparcs as well.

Apple is SO innovative (with marketing maybe)....

I don't see where the sarcasm applies, since Apple has innovated far more than Linux and Microsoft combined. The only company that could compete with Apple for the title of Most Innovated Computer Company, Ever would be IBM.

From Digit Media Online

DMN: Now, you're saying it's the first 64-bit desktop machine. But isn't there an Opteron dual-processor machine? It shipped on June 4th. BOXX Technologies shipped it. It has an Opteron 244 in it.

Rubinstein: Uh...

Akrout: It's not a desktop.

DMN: That's a desktop unit.

Akrout: It depends on what you call a desktop, now. These... From a full desktop per se, this is the first one. I don't know how you really distinguish the other one as a desktop.

DMN: Well, it's a dual processor desktop machine, just like that one.

Akrout: It's not 64, then.

DMN: Yes, it's a 64-bit machine with two Opteron chips in it. It started shipping June 4th.

Akrout: That we'll double check, but in my mind, it wasn't.

" DMN: Now, you're saying it's the first 64-bit desktop machine. But isn't there an Opteron dual-processor machine? It shipped on June 4th. BOXX Technologies shipped it. It has an Opteron 244 in it.
Rubinstein: Uh...
Akrout: It's not a desktop.
DMN: That's a desktop unit.
Akrout: It depends on what you call a desktop, now. These... From a full desktop per se, this is the first one. I don't know how you really distinguish the other one as a desktop.
DMN: Well, it's a dual processor desktop machine, just like that one.
Akrout: It's not 64, then.
DMN: Yes, it's a 64-bit machine with two Opteron chips in it. It started shipping June 4th.
Akrout: That we'll double check, but in my mind, it wasn't. "

Karma whoring.... Link to the article.

There's only one catch to your argument: Unlike Photoshop and After Effects, Premiere was hopelessly bad compared to Final Cut Pro.

Premiere's creators were interviewed at Digital Video Editing.com. I can't link easily to the article since DVE is using frames heavily, but go to the page and read part 1 of the interview. They use corpspeak and evasiveness where they can, but there's no question they were very much aware that Premiere was horribly inferior to Final Cut, in feature set, user interface and pretty much everything else.

The situation with Photoshop and After Effects could not be any more different. Both are applications beloved by their users, that have received quality updates. As a result, sales are split about 30/70 Mac/PC, instead of Premiere's 10/90 Mac/PC. Because of this, it's profitable for Adobe to produce a Mac version of these programs, especially with the new G5 offering the needed processor oomph.

In short, I would not call Apple's purchase of Final Cut betraying Adobe. I would consider it Apple's acknowledgement that they needed a high-quality video editing program, and Premiere wasn't going to do the job.

I really don't think Adobe is going to get rid of Photoshop or After Effects for the Mac, because we tend to be a pretty free-spending market. Isn't it interesting that Macs have something like 5% of the market, but 30% of Adobe sales. That's a nice contribution indeed, that can't be written off lightly.

D

"We like the Mac, but Apple currently has three [video] editing applications shipping.... It just didn't make sense for us to keep developing for the Mac when the Mac is well served by Apple." here

Translation:
Adobe Premier is Mickey Mouse BS when compared to FCP - we just could not compete. It is a good thing FCP is not available for Windows - we still have those Users under our finger.

Prediction:
If Adobe does not kick it into high gear and start making some changes (start with the interface which looks like it was designed by a focus group comprised of accountants, librarians, and lawyers) they will end up losing a good amount of their After Effects customers to Discreet' Combestion. Combustion rapes AE - hands down.

The upcoming AE 6.0 is heralded as:
"After Effects 6.0 Professional adds motion tracking and stabilization, advanced keying and warping tools, more than 30 additional visual effects, a particle system, render automation and network rendering, 16-bit-per-channel color, 3D channel effects, and additional audio effects."

Combustion had these 'new' features in late 2001 - only difference is that then it costs 4,995 and now you can get it for $995 - bye bye AE. Only advantage that AE has is all the plugins that are now being written to be combustion 2 compatible. Combustion 2.1 is available for OS X and Windows XP.

Hey - but they will still have Photoshop, right?

A similar article here. Bottomline, after reading the 2 articles: Adobe is very sensitive about direct competition from Apple. Adobe also fears that Apple might one day start giving away Pro applications for free, which is not entirely impossible because Apple is still mainly a hardware manufacturer. What, about 75% revenue from hardware sales?

Another reason stated in the article on Digital Video Editing is:

"But Premiere Pro is a new application in the sense that it has been completely reengineered, so the jump from Premiere 6.5 to Premiere Pro would have been far more of an investment ..."

This announcement seems to follow a consistent trend at Adobe: none of the applications in the digital video editing segment get an OS X version Encore DVD, Audition, now Premiere gets the axe, when will After Effects get the boot?

Keep in mind that the PowerPC architecture can do quite a bit more per clock tick than x86 hardware, so a 1.33 GHz PowerPC can probably perform about the same as at least a 2 GHz Pentium 4.

I get tired of hearing this. Real world performance is a complicated thing. Nevermind the raw computing power of the CPU (how are you going to determine this?), there's OS overhead, application optimization, compiler optimization, etc. that would significantly impact the end performance. Of course there's plenty of finger pointing when that happens.

There was a benchmark recently that showed Intel PC's trouncing Mac on video editing and Adobe expressing its preference.

Of course, this would vary quite a bit depending on the task at hand; only benchmarks will show the real numbers.

*ahem* Benchmarks? Only real world performance will show real world performance. =)

It seems to me that Apple is looking to move back to the older concept of the UNIX server: a high-end server and a (mostly) proprietary UNIX operating system sold together as a unit. For a while, it seemed like Linux and cheap-as-dirt x86 hardware were going to do away with this; now Apple is trying to introduce it as a product, albeit with more of an open soure component. Only time will tell if they can make money on this. My guess? They'll get a steady but not dominating niche market, much like they have with home computers (and for that matter, much as "big iron" UNIX still has.)

My guess is that unless a particular company needs a powerpc processor for a very specific reason, there's almost no way anyone would pick the Xserver over cheap commodity x86 hardware running Linux (despite the SCO clown show). The reason? Total control. The hardware is available anywhere (don't have to rely on any single company). The software isn't an issue. At worst, you'd have to develop your own custom Linux app to serve your needs. Either way, it's a lot safer than to tie my company's future to Apple.

I know they are really, really bad. Mot. ppc is dead. Mac zealotry keeps it alive.

HERE IS THE SMOKING GUN QUESTION FOR THE DAY:

WHY DOESN'T APPLE OR MOTOROLA SUBMIT TO SPEC.ORG FOR THE INDUSTRY STANDARD CPU AND MCPU INT AND FLOATING POINT BENCHMARK?

Motorola PPC is simply inferior.

Check out this recent review of a Mac vs. PPC scenario. Titled: Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again
Dell's Single CPU 3.06 GHz P4 Trounces Fastest DUAL Mac on the Market

Every time I have tried to independently verify ease of use claims or speed advantages that apple claims I find them to be false, ridiculous and they should probably be cited for false advertising on numerous occasions.

Now. I would like to say that I want a Power 4+ 6xx series or a Sun Blade 2000. If you don't know what these machines are or why you would want them, do not reply to this message - you don't understand anything.

I've been trying to tell Mac zealots this for some time. a Dual 1.4 "best of breed[term used laughingly]" Motorola G4 can't even beat a single P4 (I'm not a P4 pr PC lover, I find them rather cheesy, but when you get your ass handed to you, its fun to laugh. I also find the new Macs to be every bit as cheesy as the PCs, for they are essentially the same, with a different cruddy CPU at heart.)

I would like to see more lust for Opteron. The PPC970 is vapor. If you would all take a trip down to spec.org, you would all see that the SPECfp_peak of 1219 on the 1.8GHz part and the SPECint_peak of 1170 is very impressive.

And you can buy it now.

So what does the Mac "inner circle elite" have to say that a Mac head publication is letting the cat out of the bag (yet again, Digital Video Editing: Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again ).

So read it and weep. Steve Jobs, the arrogant bastard, seems to have people lusting after vapor, yet again. The story continues, history repeats and the niche is growing smaller by the day.

If they would follow from Adobe to the actual test page, they'd see that the Dell wipes up the floor with the Mac on Photoshop tests, too. Not by such a drastic margin (4.5v7.1s, 35.1v62s, and 3.4v4.5) but how does the AE bug apply there, hmm?

The same guy who did this benchmarking wrote this, not exactly unbiased. Trackback at MTG.

In the July 2002 issue of Digital Producer Magazine, Charlie White reported on a head-to-head duel between a single-processor Dell 2.53GHz Pentium® 4 -- the Dell Precision Workstation 340 -- and the fastest Macintosh then available -- a 1GHz dual-processor G4.

Read the actual article here.

This is the article (at www.digitalvideoediting.com) they get those pretty little pictures from. Haven't had a chance to read it yet but it is near at 5 months old.

How apple can dope people into thinking that Macs are just as fast as PCs in terms for performance is beyond me.

Buy a Mac because it has OS X, buy it because you like the low power consumption, the overall design and the unique style. Don't buy it because you think that it's faster.

Application benchmarks.

How Macs are faster than PCs and other lies.

Benchmarks.

processes but fast in terms of the actual work you get done.

There is no need to take an either or attitude to PC vs Mac. They play well together...

I do a certain amount of video editting. Doing the actual editting is faster on the Mac with Final Cut Pro vs Premier / Pinnacle / Ulead on the PC ( I've tried them all in an effort to stay with only one platform.)

Now doing the actual rendering on the Mac is slow....... Check out
mac vs HT PC
The above article far understates the true advantage of Intel hardware. To truly match the
Apple architecture with Intel hardware. Go to
Dell and configure a dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon Workstation with Hyperthreading on each chip. Now you have 4 processors working for you , two real and two virtual per CPU. For $3200 you get two 2.8 Ghz Xeons with 1 gig of RAM, 2 80 gig harddrives (separating the system disk from your video disk is important) and a 4x dvd+rw drive.

Still think the G4 dual processor Mac is great? Why not use the industry standard to measure your chip of choice. In the supercomputing world how fast your machine runs is more than just bragging rights, it's job security. For that reason the SPEC benchmarks were created to get standardized validated results on any hardware. Mac OS X has a SPEC suite see
Mac SPEC

Now that you've looked at that go to SPEC and look at the CPU benchmarks. Note the scaling factor for the Xeon 2.8 Ghz with two processors
SPEC CPU
Excerpt of CPU INT multiprocessor
Chip Result
2.8 GHz Xeon 10.2
2 CPU 2.8 GHz Xeon 18.0

The SPEC is designed to show good scaling with parallelism (multiple CPU) and here shows a 1.8 scaling factor.

So your Dell machine with HT will have a greater than 2 scaling factor for highly parallel processes.

NB: I only have a 2.4 Ghz P4 as my rendering machine and it's still faster than the Powermac by enough to make me stick with the mixed network approach.

So work on the Mac -> DV over gigabit ethernet to a multiprocessor Intel dual processor machine that renders AND burns the DVD, VCD, SVCD faster.

We all know Macs are better at what matters during the creative process. Let the Intel hardware bear the drudgery ;-)

not that i don't like arstechnica - but you're getting a bit spammy. anyway, try a different news source, like this.

i know you're too busy being productive to play games on your mac, but according to these results using real world productivity apps (photoshop and after effects), you're going to be waiting twice as long for your mac to finish the job (and paying $600 more to boot).

apple makes some great software and some great looking machines, but they're hamstrung by motorola's inability to compete with intel and amd on research, development, and manufacturing. until they find themselves a new core cpu architecture or motorola somehow figures out how to build a cpu that can clock into the stratosphere apple will never be able to produce a machine that can run as fast as a wintel (or lintel :) system.

and apple was right, megahertz don't matter - but gigahertz do...

not that i don't like arstechnica - but you're getting a bit spammy. anyway, try a different news source, like this.

i know you're too busy being productive to play games on your mac, but according to these results using real world productivity apps (photoshop and after effects), you're going to be waiting twice as long for your mac to finish the job (and paying $600 more to boot).

apple makes some great software and some great looking machines, but they're hamstrung by motorola's inability to compete with intel and amd on research, development, and manufacturing. until they find themselves a new core cpu architecture or motorola somehow figures out how to build a cpu that can clock into the stratosphere apple will never be able to produce a machine that can run as fast as a wintel (or lintel :) system.

and apple was right, megahertz don't matter - but gigahertz do...

The reason that PowerPC processors have remained at lower clock speeds than Intel chips is because they can get the same amount of work done, if not more, in less clock cycles than it takes for an Intel chip.

Things that make you go hmmmmmmmm? So, um, tell me again what kinds of applications the G4 was supposed to be good at?

don't forget that the 1.42 GHz, yeah that's right, 1.42, will still operate better than the latest greatest overclocked crap intel spits out.


Yup, as long as you just limit yourself to doing gaussian blurs all day long! *laughing hysterically*

Oddly enough, here's a test that shows a single 2.53GHz P4 spanking the crap out of a dual 1GHz G4-- in applications that the G4 is supposed to be better at! And the G4 is hundreds of dollars more expensive!
I'm sure the same can be said for a hyperthreaded 3.06GHz P4 vs. a dual 1.42GHz G4. Can't wait for those benchmarks.

Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again

Apple Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz
VS
Dell Precision Workstation 350 Intel P4 3.06 GHz

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/rev iews/cw_macvspciii2.htm

If by "equivalent" you mean "50% slower" than you are correct.

There is a a discussion of this over at Digital Photography Review.

Here is another Mac vs. PC test entitled Mac Slaughtered Again, which includes this quote: "Of course, Mac stalwarts will cling to the notion that Mac OS X is so much better and easier to use than Windows XP, but if you're spending all day inside After Effects, which operating system you're using makes little difference. What does make a huge difference is if you have to sit and wait for rendering any longer than necessary.

One-up pc's yet again?

Perhaps you forgot the slashdot article that pointed to this review.

Sure, Macs are on a higher level than PCs when it comes to one thing -- price.

Abject apologies. I should've checked the link first - slashdot managed to break it in the posting interface ;-;. Here's the correct one.

Correct Link

N.

Intel is NOT shipping 3.7 GHz chips...
yes the are: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20021114/index.htm l

Apple only ships duals in their towers.

Well, I did disclaim this in my original post when I exluded benchmarks optimized for MP and Altivec.

Anyway... from the benchmarks I've seen... aside from SPEC which the PPC seems to do rather poorly in, the G4 usually pulled comparable FP and Int performance to an Athlon at the same speed

You are right, the G4s are pretty slow in SPEC, but they are also considerably slower then both Athlon and P4 in videoediting apps optimized for Altivec and MP. look here for some proof.

i have come to put down apple zealots once and for all. i have put together enouhg evidence to end this argument forever. Bruising by Apple Roland Miller III - and other cases against apple

One notable fact concerning Apple's customer base is that it has always tested very highly in the category of brand loyalty. "Once a Mac user, always a Mac user." Apple has depended on this customer loyalty to get it through some rough times. It could always count on a portion of the market to continue to buy Apple products and continue to upgrade with Apple products. Despite (or perhaps due to) this loyalty, Apple has subjected its customers to some decidedly anti-customer abuses.

The latest example of Apple bruising its customers is a doozy. Due to shortages of the higher speed G4 processors, Apple speed reduced its entire line by 50 MHz and kept the prices the same. On top of that, Apple unilaterally cancelled all outstanding G4 orders with instructions that customers should reorder their systems. This has the net effect of increasing everyone's cost for the same system.

Needless to say, this action produced a massive and immediate customer backlash. Based on what I have seen on the net, this uproar lasted a few hours before Apple backed down and started to rejoin reality. After about a day of total confusion and rampant rumors followed by a week of small clarifications, Apple made right and reinstated all G4 orders except the high end 500 MHz model. Those customers were offered the choice of purchasing the "new" 450 MHz model at the original 450 MHz price, which is what should have been done in the first place.

While it is possible for me to see some corporate logic behind the original decision, never the less, this bright idea should not have left the meeting room where it was hatched. It doesn't take an MBA
(obviously) to predict the firestorm that was touched off when this decision was implemented. The only positive thing I can see in this fiasco was the speed at which corrective steps were implemented. The corporation responded to its customer's will and proved somewhat nimble in the process.

Another recent example of Apple bruising was with AppleShare IP 6.2. Apple decided to charge several hundred dollars for this upgrade (the previous being 6.1.) The only problem was that aside from a few new features, it was mainly seen as a bug-fix and compatibility upgrade for MacOS 8.6 (which itself was a free upgrade to 8.5.1.) You couldn't run ASIP 6.1 on 8.6 and you couldn't run the upgrade on 8.5. Again, the reaction was very predictable: customer outrage. Apple listened to its customers and eventually made 6.2 a free update to 6.1.

You may have also have heard about Apple purposefully preventing G3 owners from installing G4 CPU upgrades with a firmware upgrade that officially solved another problem. People were again outraged when the rumor was confirmed by all of the CPU upgrade companies. The outrage keyed on false advertising and speculation that Apple released a Trojan horse.

There were unofficial rumors from anonymous Apple employees that this firmware block will be removed with Mac OS 9. However, there has been no official word from Apple concerning this issue. In the meantime, all the CPU upgrade companies have announced that they have gotten around the block and that their respective upgrade will work fine when they ship.

While Apple has responded favorably to two of these examples, all of these misfires do take a toll. Many people simply will not tolerate this sort of behavior from a major corporation. A company simply cannot afford to make too many of these types of decisions and still remain in business.

Ultimately what can be learned from these examples?

The perception of the "bottom-line" doesn't always coincide with the needs of the consumer resulting in corporate mistakes of judgement. Some of them can be bad enough to make the pages of the Laramie Daily Boomerang. I can't speculate on whether these bad decisions were based on stupidity or on over estimating the loyalty of Apple*s customers or both. Apple has taken concrete steps in most of these cases to defuse the situation. As long as Apple continues to admit that it is wrong and make things right immediately, I will still tolerate being one of its customers.

Until next time. . .

dah dah dah.

Apple tried to block G3 owners from upgrading to G4. Nice guys. PowerForce G4 ZIF

The PowerForce G4 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) is the only G4 CPU upgrade you will want to upgrade your "Beige" Power Mac G3, "G3 All-in-One" educational model, Blue and White G3's and the Yikes Motherboard Graphite G4's. The PowerForce G4 ZIF is one of the highest performance CPU products when used with "AltiVec enhanced" software. Utilizing the second generation PowerPC 7410 processor ("G4") the PowerForce G4 includes a full 1 megabyte of backside cache running at up to 220MHz.

G4 ZIF Upgrade vs. 800MHz G4 Apple: PowerForce ZIF G4 550/220/1MB Apple G4 733 Price $289 $1599

The Bottom Line: If you already have quite a bit invested in your Power Mac G3, it just makes sense to upgrade the processor rather than opting for the new G4 systems from Apple. Apple has finally eliminated all of the legacy ports with the removal of the ADB port on the new G4 systems, not to mention the removal of the serial ports, and SCSI on the Blue and White G3 systems. So the choice is clear. PowerLogix saves you hundreds of dollars over the cost of buying a new system!

PowerLogix was the first to release a solution for the G4 ROM block for Blue and White G3s.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum= 60 839
TITLE Firmware Update: Firmware Updates 4.1.7 and Later May Disable Out-of-Spec Third-Party RAM Article ID: Created: Modified: 60839 4/12/01 9/28/01

Read up. Apple is trying to make it harder and harder to use "out of spec" hahahaha memory. Luckily www.crucial.com always works. But imagine, a firmware update that DISABLES YOUR MEMORY.

This is a good start (the buying public is sending a message to Apple, how do the intend to GROW thier market share????????)

http://www.barefeats.com/pmddr.html - new macs slower DDR

SPEC-CPU-2000 (INT/FP)AthlonXP1800MHz 738/624 -- Pentium4 2533 MHz : 893 / 878 -- Power4 1300 MHz : 804 / 1202 -- Itanium2 1000 MHz : 807 / 1356 -- G4 1000MHz 306 / 187 (read and weep http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/ )

SPEC-CPU-2000 (INT/FP)
AthlonXP1800MHz 738/624
Pentium4 2533 MHz : 893 / 878
Power4 1300 MHz : 804 / 1202
Itanium2 1000 MHz : 807 / 1356
G4 1000MHz 306 / 187 (read and weep http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/ )

AthlonXP 1533Mhz
FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE
OpenSSL 0.9.6a speed 5 Apr 2001
137.7
sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 512 bits 0.0009s 0.0001s 1109.2 14497.3 rsa 1024 bits 0.0040s 0.0002s 252.8 5308.0 rsa 2048 bits 0.0220s 0.0006s 45.6 1635.9 rsa 4096 bits 0.1419s 0.0021s 7.0 468.6 dsa 512 bits 0.0007s 0.0009s 1377.3 1161.0 dsa 1024 bits 0.0019s 0.0023s 530.2 437.7 dsa 2048 bits 0.0060s 0.0073s 165.9 137.7

P3 550MHZ x 2
FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT #3
OpenSSL 0.9.6g 9 Aug 2002
39.5
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0027s 0.0002s 375.7 4308.0
rsa 1024 bits 0.0131s 0.0007s 76.4 1499.7
rsa 2048 bits 0.0760s 0.0022s 13.2 451.7
rsa 4096 bits 0.5066s 0.0076s 2.0 130.8
dsa 512 bits 0.0023s 0.0028s 433.2 360.6
dsa 1024 bits 0.0064s 0.0078s 155.3 127.8
dsa 2048 bits 0.0212s 0.0253s 47.2 39.5

1GHz Motorola PPC OpenSSL 0.9.6
33.0
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0024s 0.0002s 422.7 4565.7
rsa 1024 bits 0.0131s 0.0007s 76.2 1433.4
rsa 2048 bits 0.0850s 0.0025s 11.8 396.5
rsa 4096 bits 0.5872s 0.0092s 1.7 108.9
dsa 512 bits 0.0022s 0.0026s 464.3 387.9
dsa 1024 bits 0.0070s 0.0085s 142.8 117.0
dsa 2048 bits 0.0245s 0.0303s 40.7 33.0

G4 867 / 896MB / 10.1.2
24.2
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0029s 0.0003s 346.3 3521.8
rsa 1024 bits 0.0172s 0.0009s 58.3 1062.2
rsa 2048 bits 0.1149s 0.0034s 8.7 293.4
rsa 4096 bits 0.8009s 0.0128s 1.2 78.3
dsa 512 bits 0.0027s 0.0034s 366.6 295.3
dsa 1024 bits 0.0094s 0.0114s 106.8 87.4
dsa 2048 bits 0.0334s 0.0413s 29.9 24.2

Mystery ClawHammer/.
signs/sec verifies/sec
rsa 512bits 965.9 12211.9
rsa1024 bits 205.0 3980.0
rsa 2048 bits 33.0 1093.3
rsa 4096 bits 4.7 288.5

I laugh at you, as i sit on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT on an SMP box that will whip your fucking gay shit machine's ass. With a Cherry on top, I get to use win2k for crap-software.

I just installed 6C115 OS 10.2 final on a G4 with 1GB of ram. SNORE. Youd think Apple would pick up on the fact they have a slow implementation of Unix on slow and inferior hardware.

Look to IBM Power4 or Intel for salvation, Motorola sucks. Intel has a larger payroll that Motorola makes on the PPC, and it shows, losers.

You make me sick you MAC zealot maggot. I see through you. Your snarky little "hahahaha," your non chalant elitist proto-communist attitude. You make me sick. You want to legislate mediocrity because you are a communist and dont belive the biggest, fastest or most qualified should win. Feiss isn't aout MAC, It is such a stupid fag-ridden ad campaign, I as a Unix and PC user (as well as SPARC and HPPA) have noticed this CRAP. As far as feiss being cute, I would let her suck me off and I would crap on her for a nice Schei*e video. As far as SPEC marks go, truth hurts, doesnt 'it zealot? You like making Jobs richer? Keep at it losers. The day my company fired an x-apple (& x-NEXT) employee was the day things go better around the office - he was a techno nerd jerk, he wanted technology for technology's sake, not because it was useful. He failed to do his job, and we fired him. I hope you contract terminal cancer you snarky little faceless mac zealot fuck!

Project status as of Oct 1994
CMU is no longer doing general system development work on the Mach Operating System Kernel. The reseach goals of Mach were accomplished and faculty interest in OS research has moved in new directions. As a result, suppport for external users of the Mach kernel is mostly just in the form of on-line help files, documents and unlicensed code. The Mach WWW Home Page will direct you to other sources of information.

There is still some work being done at CMU on the Mach multi-server system (Mach_US) and real-time Mach. Information about both of these areas is accessible from the Mach home page. Mark Stevenson may contacted about Mach_US at jms@cs.cmu.edu. The Mach real-time group can be reached at rt-mach-request@cs.cmu.edu.

Development work on Mach is also continuing at the Open Software foundation, University of Utah's Flexmach project, Helsinki University of Technology's LITES system and the Free Software Foundation's HURD system.

Last updated on Oct, 1994 by mrt@cs.cmu.edu

Apple profits halve in Q2

Jobs preducts flatness ahead

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05

APPLE MADE A NET profit of $32 million for its third quarter, almost half the profit it made in the same period last year, and turnover fell three per cent to $1.43 billion compared to the quarter in 2001.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

Funny, a BSD platform hanging in the balance because it fails an an MSFT VAR. Its not BSDs fault, trust me, its Apple.

Will Microsoft dump Mac support? http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4485
Two firms slag off each other

By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 12:22

IS MICROSOFT CONTEMPLATING ditching support for Apple Macs? That's the thrust of an article that appeared on Wininfo a day or two back, but if Microsoft is getting out of the Mac market, it's not quite yet.

And all is not well in other respects, reports Mac Rumors, which has posted what it says is an Apple FAQ saying people will have to pay for .mac accounts.

Microsoft has already prepared a press release to time with the Macworld Expo saying that it has announced a Microsoft Office V.x "triple header", this being an announcement which offers better mobility with Palm handheld for Entourage X, a way to buy Office v.X cheaper, and some Windows compatibility with the RDC client.

The Wininfo article, however, quotes Kevin Browne, who runs the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft as saying Apple hasn't made much of an effort to promote Mac OSX, even though there are opportunities.

He is quoted as saying that "if things don't dramatically turn round", it might be Goodnight Mr Chips for Steve Jobs firm.

But the same article says that Apple blames Microsoft for sales problems with Office v.X.

Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates have traditionally had a somewhat strained relationship. Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end between the two companies?

Wininfo.

Mac Rumors is providing a blow-by-blow account of what's happening at MacExpo on the site link above - it seems Apple may well announce support for Nforce 2, too.

On the Nvidia site, here, you'll see that Digital Vibrance Control is "currently unavailable on Mac systems", which is more than just a hint, we guess. *

*JOBS KICKS off MacWorld Expo at the Javitz Center at 09:00 Eastern time. There will be a live Webcast using Quicktime, natch, here.

Note: The Dell 1650 and 2650 are both cheaper, the 2650 has SMT, and ECC (and nice linux ecc support as well, it logs ECC errors in syslog). They also include onboard RAID(option via 7899 asic) and a U160 AIC-7899 by default. And you can buy retail CPUs and retail memory for Dells often at half the price without voiding the warranty.

Apple charges $500 per 120GB EIDE drive. HAHAHAHA.

Apple is right about one thing, that Alpha has existed for some time, but have you ever tried actually buying an Alpha? Its hard, I know an engineer who works for
DEC->/Compaq->/HP, and I was dying to buy one, and he couldnt find
anyone to call me
about getting one.

Apple's New 1U servers: Sorry. Doesn't fit well in a market where the Dell 1550/1650 and 2550 and 2650 exist. Sorry. THEY DON'T PUBLISH SPEC numbers. Apple is a dying breed, I just recently tried to revive my interest in them only to be disappointed. The Motorola PPC architecture is embarrassingly slow, and they always are quick to point out the near-useless Altivec and some obscure filter in Photoshop, but its not true. I have a Mac, several PCs and a SPARC at *home*, so trust me people, this box is a bore. And OS X and Open ClosedROM make putting regular memory, disks and CPU upgrades NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE, they try to block it so you have to buy the same part from them 3x the cost. And the Dell 530 Dual P4-Xeon with SMT buries the fastest Mac by almost a factor of two. OS X is no great shakes as of yet because even though most of the porting off of Classic has been done, there are annoying remnants of classic everywhere, including a gamut of Apple utilities. These are notoriously the worst Administrator-unfriendly boxes in the industry, and I have used a few boxen in my time. OS X's Darwin kernel will be sorely eclipsed by Linux 2.6, and 2.4.X is already superior in all the ways I can tell (This isnt to say BSD it bad, but I dont think this OS demands a PREMIUM). I tried YellowDog, Madrake and Debian on PPC as well, and they ran (even with aggressive G3
optimizations) rather
poorly - but interestingly far faster than native OS X.
This is a dying gasp of air from a dead Unix vendor, who has had to turn themselves into a Microsoft VAR (most popular Mac Application: Microsoft Office X). If you have an insatiable fetish for PPC, DON*T. Wait for Hammer. Remind yourself about SMT, and 2.8GHz clock speeds before you go pay for obsolete/deprecated silicon. And the term RISC? Pathetic. I happily resell our product on a 1650 and 2650. We "configured" a Mac box because we were genuinely curious. We laughed at the final price and moved on. This isn*t a troll, or a flame * its reality. What this box does can be done with a 1650, with redundant power supplies, with SCSI and hardware raid build ON BOARD, dual gigabit NICs onboard, dual 1400 MHZ/512cache Tualatin (with SPEC numbers to gauge the performance
by) (2650 gets high clock Xeons), two 64bit/66Mhz slots, onboard video, console redirection, USB, etc. And for half the price. And you can use retail Intel CPUs,(cheap), retail hard drives (if you don*t want to buy the Dell ones at a modest premium), and retail Crucial.com memory (the same memory Dell uses for Half the price). All in all, you get a box, for half the price, with twice the features and performance. And this is coming from a person who doesn*t even LIKE Dell. (I feel I can always build better more reliable systems than most of the PC vendors.) BBBBBBZT. Apple, you lost, you lost, you will always be niche because OS X isn't where it needs to be * on an X86.

TO give a better link for you, since you will have trouble finding this on your own, I'll put you right where you need to be to see Motorola PPC chips are, well, so horrible they wont publish industry standard Specmarks. http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.ht ml

Sorry. Apple. Steve Jobs keeps them in business but his ego is trash. I know people who work there, personally . You pay for his ego.

Ok. Publish your findings. No, I didnt think so. So its as conjective as my assertations, which are based on my whim in addition to evideince (or lacktherof), and the reading of the CPU Report, EE Times, etc. I'm into this industry, and unless you are a zealot, you would know PPC is IBM now. Motorola is in the dirt.

Bzzt. I like NeXT. Ahead of its time, over priced. Darwin is useless, I have 1.4.1, its crap. OS X is nice looking, but it is *very* easy to "piss" the system off, its package manager is so bad compared to RPM I wont even start, and it is, as as what I consider a *nix to be, wholly inadequate and incomplete. Next.

About being content free, thats a snarky, trollish accusation. Now why dont you use Purify on yourself and remove all the said cruft and actually say something in Apple's defense besides naming Mach 3.0+ (like if it was 5.0+ would it make a shit bit of difference.) I hate zealotry.

And about computing pleasure. This isnt fafenugen or a driving experience, dude, its about stuff WORKING, well, for the lowest cost with the cheapest parts. There is no sex appeal in server administration.

Funny, everytime I have gone to a Mac shop they have, for as long as I can ever remember, always, ALWAYS had NT based servers. Unilaterally.

And I saw a few Mac shops in my time in New York.

You know what, not that I like NT, but they worked more reliably (generally Compaq
servers) than the Macs did. (Mostly these days non parity memory and no SCSI anymore, its a PC with horrible Mot-PPC).

Funny. When I run a linux or *nix or NT based server I dont have a .DOC reader installed. Ever. Maybe a PDF reader if I can't figure something out using google, a few nesgroups and other better-than-manuals-and-man-page sources.

For those wondering why .DOC is still a problem, I have noticed that documents shared even between Office X, XP and 2002 are very inconsistent. Its MSFT playing the upgrade me to fix problems game. For complicated layout and manuals, use Framaker or a LaTeX backended application or something realistic.

As far as OS X being "young", I think its probably the oldest feeling Unix there is. Old kernel, old Unix specification (I happen to like what I find in a SYS V style /etc) and old binaries included without gcc in the default install. Its only young in that Apple does not know very well how to serve people who use unix.

I gave OS X a fair shot on a G3 with 1GB of memory. Its good. I wated to use it instead of Microsoft crap for home use, but I wouldnt switch from Win2k after that. They also block CPU upgrade cards, which are expensive. They try to block 3rd party memory. The included keyboard and mouse always sucks. And they try not to partition non-apple drives with Drive Setup, which is the WORST partitioning utility, and Apple's partition maps are screwed up and stupid, and trying to run OS X without classic is diffcult because so many fools still have ported thier stuff to OS X.

I'll stick to PCs for home computing, and think about other vendors for servers.

I gave OS X a fair shake. I have many machines at home and with Gnucleus I was able to get just about every Mac app compiled native for OS X in existence. (Thank god I wont be keeping any of them or buying any of them - try before you buy, people)

I have to say that the total lack of incumbent middleware is horrible with OS X. Its barely an OS out of the box. I hate having to boot from a CD to manage anything, and its multiboot handling is inferior. The Norton set of tools is pathetically weak for the money. Office X is admittedly excellent. But thats it. IE was mentioned not too long ago as rendering incorrectly and having a huge security flaw that is fixed in 5.2.1, but the response from MSFT took much longer than they do for x86.

If OS X was ported to x86 (looks like it has) I would buy it. Period. Forget buying a PPC ripp off machine though.

I noticed on the OS X cd there is i386 directories littering the place and darwin
(hahahah) works on like one computer with an intel chip deep in the belly of Apple, but they are not trying to make Darwin/X86 more appeling than ANY ANY of the other BSDs, they all destroy Darwin in useablility, even when you get darwin from http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/.

I came, I saw, I mastered it, I left. Its BORING.

And as far as IPFW. IPF for OpenBSD is out. and there are no decent APP-firewalls for OS X (Firewalk sucks), Brickhouse is a joke of a GUI.

I am thinking Kerio Winroute/Personal Firewall as a base comparison. The fact nothing analogous exists in Mac OS X land make this platform more unuseable. Also, if Apple like fit and finish on Unix, why dont they make the more complicated things useable througha GUI (like Brickhouse did for IPF). Noo, the only people Apple caters to is those who die thier hair purple and sucks on pacifier and laugh at baby rattles while they are e-tarded from thier last bout with Xtasy after the cool rave for mac zealots.

1 - Nope, not a troll opinion. People trying to name trolls are often themselves trolling by crying wolf.

2 - Pirate, no. I deleted the software. They are liars because they say on their product literature that the product can do things it simply cannot. Do you buy a car without a test drive. NO. Do lots of states have cool-off periods. Yes. Are you are one of those inferior software developers that cant let people try before they buy because you cant deliver on your promise? Or you just and advocate for that because you benefit somehow?

3 - OS X would be easier to eat (its cheap at $130.) if I could use it on a cheap Intel box. Then I could leave it there, tinker with it, do more to make what I like about other Unices available to OS X. I borrowed a Mac G3 (350/1MB cache, 1GB memory, 15GB HDD/2MB
buffer) and * Linux ran better (Debian, Yellowdog and Mandrake * I did try them all) , * GNU-Darwin was near-useless compared to the Linuxes * let alone that pile of garbage apple calls Darwin 1.4.1, and * Mac OS X was horribly slow and clunky. I also find that Administration in OS X is counterintuitive.

Now to address your pathetic complexes. Your quoting is interesting. You were upset about my thread(s) and were looking to pick apart any of my comments. Grasping at straws. First tactic you used was name calling / labeling. Cheap shot. Then you tried to confuse good consumer strategy (protecting my wallet from thieving/lying software developers who often sell your privacy to marketing companies, and fail to deliver proper support for software and force version upgrades that should be called service packs) with piracy, and thus , you were attempting to assassinate my character. I would never, and have never, created revenue for myself, any of the businesses I have worked for with unlicensed or pirated software. I am an advocate for paying for what you use to generate revenue for yourself. I utterly resent your insinuations. Now you try and hit your own self justified home run by saying "Nah, wah, why would you want OS X if you don*t like it wash." I don*t mind the software, I think it is a meritorious endeavor to have a polished UI on Unix. I don*t see the point in cornering it to a pass* , deprecated, slow SPECmarkless overpriced platform. I would appreciate it far more if it would be ported to x86, but alas, Microsoft would pull the Office X plug because it would compete (rather well I might add) with Windows XP. Therefore, Apple is a Microsoft VAR, their existence is to stay afloat and give their shareholders money, not innovate anything useful in the community.

Sorry I wasn*t fooled by them like you were. I resent you, you are alike Mao, Stalin, Hitler. The experts agree, censorship works. If I am a fool, let me foolishness speak for itself * as writing on this wall* * but you are far more sinister than fool, you want to dictate, excise, remove. You want the world to be as you see it, and cannot accept a subjective opinion because you are probably sexless and very pathetic. I resent you.

I RESENT ALL OF YOU APPLE MAC LUNATIC ZEALOTS!

Zealot. You are a lying Zealot. I have a G3 no one wanted. I got OS 10.2 running. It sucks ass, and G3 are slower than pig-shit. The OS is not Unix power user friendly. Its packaging system is HORRIBLE. You don*t know what you are talking about * AT ALL.

http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/
Go here to see it G4-1000, spec INT of 306 (SPEC-CPU2000), P3-1000 spec INT of 309. Hhahaha.

Dual G4 1000 Macs are getting DESTROYED by a SINGLE P4 in benchmarks. Zealots, deny this one. http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs said this week that his company would consider moving to Intel chips, but that he would wait until at least 2003 because the transition to Mac OS X was more important. But with the speed of Power PC hardware increasingly falling behind Intel's chips--The Pentium 4 will hit 3 GHz this year--Apple would be wise to do a bit of research. I recommend AMD's upcoming 64-bit Opteron, which will give Apple a technological leg up on Windows and, perhaps, offer them Windows compatibility through the Opteron's full compatibility with 32-bit x86 code. Come on, Apple: Do the right thing." Read the blurb on WinInformant. Read more for a short commentary.

"The dual Athlon is still the fastest PC we've tested, but the single Intel P4 2.53 GHz machine runs a close second, and even beats the dual Athlon on some of the tests. And, as expected, the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up with these two PCs. Even though the P4 machine has only a single processor, it was easy for it to leave the dual-processor Mac far behind." Read the benchmarks at DigitalVideoEditing.

A quick comparison, when using the better compilers for the x86 CPUs:

Integer Results:
Athlon 1666 (2000+) : 697
P4 2200 : 790
G4 1000 : 306
PIII 667 : 310

Floating Point Results:
Athlon 1666 : 596
P4 2200 : 779
G4 1000: 187
PIII 667 : 222

For the people who argue that Altivec was not enabled. This is true, but it is also unfair.

The compiler they used, gcc 2.95.2, doesn't know how to use MMX or SSE either, and barely knows how to use the PPro floating-point instructions FCOMI and FCMOVcc.

Fuck those Mongoloid retards. Never in my life have I seen a royal fuckup as them not being able to whip MSFT ass with OS X. But they had to fuck-face try to be a hardware vendor in a world of cheap chink knockoffs (where the hardware is commoditized to the point where there is little quality variance) where even Compaq died and shriveled up. Fucking idiots.

"Will Microsoft dump Mac support? Two firms slag off each other By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 12:22 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4485

"Apple profits halve in Q2 Jobs predicts flatness ahead By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

" "bait and switch." Apple: Apple to Unveil .Mac Today Posted by pudge on Wednesday July 17, @04:31AM Steve Mason writes "Apple has put up a .Mac FAQ up here proving that .Mac will indeed be introduced at Mac World New York. .Mac will cost $100 a year as previous rumors had reported." Yes, this means that if you don't pay Apple, your mac.com URL and email address will stop working. Some have suggested that the "switch" in Apple's new ad campaign stands for the unfortunate part of a "bait and switch." Someone should mirror that URL, it might be taken down any second now.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/1 7/ 1134213&mode=nested&tid=107

Zealots. He used the word "magic" and excused unethical business practice, ignore their plunging profits and growing customer dissatisfaction, their complete loss of the educations market only to have their stake in things being upheld by horn-rimmed-glass wearing elitist "artists" and "musicians" who have to make it look like if you create art or music on anything but a Mac its amateurish and unprofessional because they don*t know what the fuck they are doing and are being shown up by talented/poor people with PCs.

I have *never* met a Mac user that has taught me one things about computing. Ever.

Steve Jobs is egotistical, and he chose to not take on XP head to head with OS X. Now OS X is relegated to a niche processor, once Adobe and MSFT pull the plug (notice Adobe took considerable time to get OS X versions of their stuff out the door with CALL-HOME on all their apps for the Mac) there wont be much to speak of in terms of software. If OS X was for x86, there would be sex appeal, the would make more money and the x86 would finally get an Open Firmware and a vendor with a deep respect for building the right things (an the wrong video chipsets) on the motherboards.

The Apple ][ was it for them. After that, the TRASH-80 seems like a holy crusade.

I have a G3 here beside me, and I can't upgrade the CPU officially, they wont give a 4.X firmware for it, so much for OPEN-firmware, its slow as fucking SHIT with this horribly slow clock and HALF SPEED cache, and there is no SCSI. It*s a PC with a slow CPU.

I never had any intention of running MacOSX server on it. Instead I wanted to run NetBSD.

The Xserve uses Motorola 7455 processor with 2MB of L3 cache and PC2100 RAM. Unfortunately, even though this is a "server" class machine, Apple skimped and did not allow you to use ECC memory. For a datacenter machine, this seems remarkably short sighted.

While the machine is quick, it still lags behind the high-end P4 and Athlon's when it comes to doing NetBSD builds. It is slightly slower the same speed as 1.4GHz Athlon.

If you need a lot of powerpc computing in a small form factor, the Xserve is a nice box but x86 still has it beat when it comes to price/performance.

One last thing, the Xserve is exceptionally loud. Granted it is a 1U box but it is louder than other 1U I've ever heard.

After having a (single CPU) Xserve to play for the past week, I thought I'd try to interject some of my experience with it.
I have to say that the Xserve is not the first dual processor RISC 1U machine. The Alpha powered CS20 precedes by well over a year (which can have two 833MHz 21264 (EV67) cpus).

Note: The Dell 1650 and 2650 are both cheaper, the 2650 has SMT, and ECC (and nice linux
ecc support as well, it logs ECC errors in syslog). They also include onboard RAID(option
via 7899 asic) and a U160 AIC-7899 by default. And you can buy retail CPUs and retail
memory for Dells often at half the price without voiding the warranty.

Apple charges $500 per 120GB EIDE drive. HAHAHAHA.

Apple is right about one thing, that Alpha has existed for some time, but have you ever
tried actually buying an Alpha? Its hard, I know an engineer who works for
DEC->/Compaq->/HP, and I was dying to buy one, and he couldnt find anyone to call me
about getting one.

Apple's New 1U servers: Sorry. Doesn't fit well in a market where the Dell 1550/1650 and
2550 and 2650 exist. Sorry. THEY DON'T PUBLISH SPEC numbers. Apple is a dying breed, I
just recently tried to revive my interest in them only to be disappointed. The Motorola
PPC architecture is embarrassingly slow, and they always are quick to point out the
near-useless Altivec and some obscure filter in Photoshop, but its not true. I have a Mac,
several PCs and a SPARC at *home*, so trust me people, this box is a bore. And OS X and
Open ClosedROM make putting regular memory, disks and CPU upgrades NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE, they
try to block it so you have to buy the same part from them 3x the cost. And the Dell 530
Dual P4-Xeon with SMT buries the fastest Mac by almost a factor of two.
OS X is no great shakes as of yet because even though most of the porting off of Classic
has been done, there are annoying remnants of classic everywhere, including a gamut of
Apple utilities. These are notoriously the worst Administrator-unfriendly boxes in the
industry, and I have used a few boxen in my time. OS X's Darwin kernel will be sorely
eclipsed by Linux 2.6, and 2.4.X is already superior in all the ways I can tell (This isnt
to say BSD it bad, but I dont think this OS demands a PREMIUM). I tried YellowDog, Madrake
and Debian on PPC as well, and they ran (even with aggressive G3 optimizations) rather
poorly - but interestingly far faster than native OS X.
This is a dying gasp of air from a dead Unix vendor, who has had to turn themselves into a
Microsoft VAR (most popular Mac Application: Microsoft Office X).
If you have an insatiable fetish for PPC, DON*T. Wait for Hammer. Remind yourself about
SMT, and 2.8GHz clock speeds before you go pay for obsolete/deprecated silicon. And the
term RISC? Pathetic.
I happily resell our product on a 1650 and 2650. We "configured" a Mac box
because we were genuinely curious. We laughed at the final price and moved on.
This isn*t a troll, or a flame * its reality. What this box does can be done with a 1650,
with redundant power supplies, with SCSI and hardware raid build ON BOARD, dual gigabit
NICs onboard, dual 1400 MHZ/512cache Tualatin (with SPEC numbers to gauge the performance
by) (2650 gets high clock Xeons), two 64bit/66Mhz slots, onboard video, console
redirection, USB, etc. And for half the price. And you can use retail Intel CPUs,(cheap),
retail hard drives (if you don*t want to buy the Dell ones at a modest premium), and
retail Crucial.com memory (the same memory Dell uses for Half the price). All in all, you
get a box, for half the price, with twice the features and performance. And this is coming
from a person who doesn*t even LIKE Dell. (I feel I can always build better more reliable
systems than most of the PC vendors.)
BBBBBBZT. Apple, you lost, you lost, you will always be niche because OS X isn't where it
needs to be * on an X86.

TO give a better link for you, since you will have trouble finding this on your own, I'll put you right where you need to be to see Motorola PPC chips are, well, so horrible they wont publish industry standard Specmarks.
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/result s/cpu2000.ht ml

Sorry. Apple. Steve Jobs keeps them in business but his ego is trash. I know people who work there, personally . You pay for his ego.

Ok. Publish your findings. No, I didnt think so. So its as conjective as my assertations,
which are based on my whim in addition to evideince (or lacktherof), and the reading of
the CPU Report, EE Times, etc. I'm into this industry, and unless you are a zealot, you
would know PPC is IBM now. Motorola is in the dirt.

Bzzt. I like NeXT. Ahead of its time, over priced. Darwin is useless, I have 1.4.1, its
crap. OS X is nice looking, but it is *very* easy to "piss" the system off, its
package manager is so bad compared to RPM I wont even start, and it is, as as what I
consider a *nix to be, wholly inadequate and incomplete. Next.

About being content free, thats a snarky, trollish accusation. Now why dont you use Purify
on yourself and remove all the said cruft and actually say something in Apple's defense
besides naming Mach 3.0+ (like if it was 5.0+ would it make a shit bit of difference.) I
hate zealotry.

And about computing pleasure. This isnt fafenugen or a driving experience, dude, its about
stuff WORKING, well, for the lowest cost with the cheapest parts. There is no sex appeal
in server administration.

Funny, everytime I have gone to a Mac shop they have, for as long as I can ever remember,
always, ALWAYS had NT based servers. Unilaterally.

And I saw a few Mac shops in my time in New York.

You know what, not that I like NT, but they worked more reliably (generally Compaq
servers) than the Macs did. (Mostly these days non parity memory and no SCSI anymore, its

Funny. When I run a linux or *nix or NT based server I dont have a .DOC reader installed.
Ever. Maybe a PDF reader if I can't figure something out using google, a few nesgroups and
other better-than-manuals-and-man-page sources.

For those wondering why .DOC is still a problem, I have noticed that documents shared even
between Office X, XP and 2002 are very inconsistent. Its MSFT playing the upgrade me to
fix problems game. For complicated layout and manuals, use Framaker or a LaTeX backended
application or something realistic.

As far as OS X being "young", I think its probably the oldest feeling Unix there
is. Old kernel, old Unix specification (I happen to like what I find in a SYS V style /etc) and old binaries included without gcc in the default install. Its only young in that
Apple does not know very well how to serve people who use unix.

I gave OS X a fair shot on a G3 with 1GB of memory. Its good. I wated to use it instead of
Microsoft crap for home use, but I wouldnt switch from Win2k after that. They also block
CPU upgrade cards, which are expensive. They try to block 3rd party memory. The included
keyboard and mouse always sucks. And they try not to partition non-apple drives with Drive
Setup, which is the WORST partitioning utility, and Apple's partition maps are screwed up
and stupid, and trying to run OS X without classic is diffcult because so many fools still
have ported thier stuff to OS X.

I'll stick to PCs for home computing, and think about other vendors for servers.

IS MICROSOFT CONTEMPLATING ditching support for Apple Macs?
That's the thrust of an article that appeared on Wininfo a day or two back, but if
Microsoft is getting out of the Mac market, it's not quite yet.

And all is not well in other respects, reports Mac Rumors, which has posted what it says
is an Apple FAQ saying people will have to pay for .mac accounts.

Microsoft has already prepared a press release to time with the Macworld Expo saying that
it has announced a Microsoft Office V.x "triple header", this being an
announcement which offers better mobility with Palm handheld for Entourage X, a way to buy
Office v.X cheaper, and some Windows compatibility with the RDC client.

The Wininfo article, however, quotes Kevin Browne, who runs the Mac Business Unit at
Microsoft as saying Apple hasn't made much of an effort to promote Mac OSX, even though
there are opportunities.

He is quoted as saying that "if things don't dramatically turn round", it might
be Goodnight Mr Chips for Steve Jobs firm.

But the same article says that Apple blames Microsoft for sales problems with Office
v.X.

Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates have traditionally had a somewhat strained relationship.
Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end between the two companies?

Wininfo.

Mac Rumors is providing a blow-by-blow account of what's happening at MacExpo on the site
link above - it seems Apple may well announce support for Nforce 2, too.

On the Nvidia site, here, you'll see that Digital Vibrance Control is "currently
unavailable on Mac systems", which is more than just a hint, we guess. *

*JOBS KICKS off MacWorld Expo at the Javitz Center at 09:00 Eastern time. There will be a
live Webcast using Quicktime, natch, here.

This is a good start (the buying public is sending a message to Apple, how do the intend
to GROW thier market share????????)

Apple profits halve in Q2

Jobs preducts flatness ahead

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05

APPLE MADE A NET profit of $32 million for its third quarter, almost half the profit it
made in the same period last year, and turnover fell three per cent to $1.43 billion
compared to the quarter in 2001.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum= 60 839
TITLE Firmware Update: Firmware Updates 4.1.7 and Later May Disable Out-of-Spec Third-Party RAM Article ID: Created: Modified: 60839 4/12/01 9/28/01

Read up. Apple is trying to make it harder and harder to use "out of spec" hahahaha memory. Luckily www.crucial.com always works. But imagine, a firmware update that DISABLES YOUR MEMORY.

Apple tried to block G3 owners from upgrading to G4. Nice guys.
PowerForce G4 ZIF

The PowerForce G4 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) is the only G4 CPU upgrade you will want to upgrade your "Beige" Power Mac G3, "G3 All-in-One" educational model, Blue and White G3's and the Yikes Motherboard Graphite G4's. The PowerForce G4 ZIF is one of the highest performance CPU products when used with "AltiVec enhanced" software. Utilizing the second generation PowerPC 7410 processor ("G4") the PowerForce G4 includes a full 1 megabyte of backside cache running at up to 220MHz.

G4 ZIF Upgrade vs. 800MHz G4 Apple: PowerForce ZIF G4 550/220/1MB Apple G4 733 Price $289 $1599

The Bottom Line: If you already have quite a bit invested in your Power Mac G3, it just makes sense to upgrade the processor rather than opting for the new G4 systems from Apple. Apple has finally eliminated all of the legacy ports with the removal of the ADB port on the new G4 systems, not to mention the removal of the serial ports, and SCSI on the Blue and White G3 systems. So the choice is clear. PowerLogix saves you hundreds of dollars over the cost of buying a new system!

PowerLogix was the first to release a solution for the G4 ROM block for Blue and White G3s.

Bruising by Apple
Roland Miller III

One notable fact concerning Apple's customer base is that it has always tested very highly in the category of brand loyalty. "Once a Mac user, always a Mac user." Apple has depended on this customer loyalty to get it through some rough times. It could always count on a portion of the market to continue to buy Apple products and continue to upgrade with Apple products. Despite (or perhaps due to) this loyalty, Apple has subjected its customers to some decidedly anti-customer abuses.

The latest example of Apple bruising its customers is a doozy. Due to shortages of the higher speed G4 processors, Apple speed reduced its entire line by 50 MHz and kept the prices the same. On top of that, Apple unilaterally cancelled all outstanding G4 orders with instructions that customers should reorder their systems. This has the net effect of increasing everyone's cost for the same system.

Needless to say, this action produced a massive and immediate customer backlash. Based on what I have seen on the net, this uproar lasted a few hours before Apple backed down and started to rejoin reality. After about a day of total confusion and rampant rumors followed by a week of small clarifications, Apple made right and reinstated all G4 orders except the high end 500 MHz model. Those customers were offered the choice of purchasing the "new" 450 MHz model at the original 450 MHz price, which is what should have been done in the first place.

While it is possible for me to see some corporate logic behind the original decision, never the less, this bright idea should not have left the meeting room where it was hatched. It doesn't take an MBA (obviously) to predict the firestorm that was touched off when this decision was implemented. The only positive thing I can see in this fiasco was the speed at which corrective steps were implemented. The corporation responded to its customer's will and proved somewhat nimble in the process.

Another recent example of Apple bruising was with AppleShare IP 6.2. Apple decided to charge several hundred dollars for this upgrade (the previous being 6.1.) The only problem was that aside from a few new features, it was mainly seen as a bug-fix and compatibility upgrade for MacOS 8.6 (which itself was a free upgrade to 8.5.1.) You couldn't run ASIP 6.1 on 8.6 and you couldn't run the upgrade on 8.5. Again, the reaction was very predictable: customer outrage. Apple listened to its customers and eventually made 6.2 a free update to 6.1.

You may have also have heard about Apple purposefully preventing G3 owners from installing G4 CPU upgrades with a firmware upgrade that officially solved another problem. People were again outraged when the rumor was confirmed by all of the CPU upgrade companies. The outrage keyed on false advertising and speculation that Apple released a Trojan horse.

There were unofficial rumors from anonymous Apple employees that this firmware block will be removed with Mac OS 9. However, there has been no official word from Apple concerning this issue. In the meantime, all the CPU upgrade companies have announced that they have gotten around the block and that their respective upgrade will work fine when they ship.

While Apple has responded favorably to two of these examples, all of these misfires do take a toll. Many people simply will not tolerate this sort of behavior from a major corporation. A company simply cannot afford to make too many of these types of decisions and still remain in business.

Ultimately what can be learned from these examples?

The perception of the "bottom-line" doesn't always coincide with the needs of the consumer resulting in corporate mistakes of judgment. Some of them can be bad enough to make the pages of the Laramie Daily Boomerang. I can't speculate on whether these bad decisions were based on stupidity or on over estimating the loyalty of Apple*s customers or both. Apple has taken concrete steps in most of these cases to defuse the situation. As long as Apple continues to admit that it is wrong and make things right immediately, I will still tolerate being one of its customers.

Until next time. . .

It wasn't meant to be a troll. And thank you for your honesty.

I gave OS X a fair shake. I have many machines at home and with Gnucleus I was able to get
just about every Mac app compiled native for OS X in existence. (Thank god I wont be
keeping any of them or buying any of them - try before you buy, people)

I have to say that the total lack of incumbent middleware is horrible with OS X. Its
barely an OS out of the box. I hate having to boot from a CD to manage anything, and its
multiboot handling is inferior. The Norton set of tools is pathetically weak for the
money. Office X is admittedly excellent. But that's it. IE was mentioned not too long ago
as rendering incorrectly and having a huge security flaw that is fixed in 5.2.1, but the
response from MSFT took much longer than they do for x86.

If OS X was ported to x86 (looks like it has) I would buy it. Period. Forget buying a PPC
ripp off machine though.

I noticed on the OS X cd there is i386 directories littering the place and Darwin
(hahahah) works on like one computer with an intel chip deep in the belly of Apple, but
they are not trying to make Darwin/X86 more appealing than ANY ANY of the other BSDs, they
all destroy Darwin in usability, even when you get Darwin from
http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/.

I came, I saw, I mastered it, I left. Its BORING.

And as far as IPFW. IPF for OpenBSD is out. and there are no decent APP-firewalls for OS X
(Firewalk sucks), Brickhouse is a joke of a GUI.

I am thinking Kerio Winroute/Personal Firewall as a base comparison. The fact nothing
analogous exists in Mac OS X land make this platform more unusable. Also, if Apple like
fit and finish on Unix, why dont they make the more complicated things useable through
GUI (like Brickhouse did for IPF). Noo, the only people Apple caters to is those who die
their hair purple and sucks on pacifier and laugh at baby rattles while they are e-tarded
from their last bout with Xtasy after the cool rave for mac zealots.

: We can forget about this because its a pipe dream and it wont ever happen and it wont ever happen because its a pipe dream.

I think its clear its a pipe dream, we can forget about it because its a pipedreamery factory pumping out pipes and dreams.

: PIPE DREAM
: openfirmware is worst
its like you get a command line
: anything apple is worse
: its poop
: of something worse than unuseable
: you can run like 10 OSes on a pc
: well even suns have openfirmware
: its not like clear why its good
: crapple is like 3 oses, tops
: alpha SRM is good
: linBIOS (pipe Dream) would be good
: repairing remote filesystems over the network isnt gay
: like a real SRM would let you do
: but not going to happen in PC LAND
: its a pipe dream
: and openfirmware, while technically correct, is CRAP
: FUCKING CRAP
: zzzz
: it is
: its all crap
: like IOS is better for a boot loader
: but crapple is the crap of the crap
: cream of the crap
: creamy pussy
: nasty dirty
: creaming crud

According to this benchmark, on the same website.. Adobe Products under MacOS X are not well designed for dual cpu machines. If you look at the scores, the dual CPU machines get almot the same rating that the single cpus..

Final Cut Pro is an other story..

So.. if you "double" the Mac score.. you gets beatten now? ;)

coz it got old really fast...

Check out this article that answers your question. It shows how the new Intel chip in a Dell workstation blows the pants off a dual-cpu Apple computer for less cost.

Try this if you want newsworthy.. even though one could have guessed as much. This thing really is that fast. The real trick is getting that kind of power into a laptop of reasonable (ie, sub-4-pound) size and getting 5 hours of use out of it.

A dual 1GHz G4 OS X system vs the $300 cheaper dual Athlon 1800+ MP WinXP box, which normally comes with a gig of RAM, but they ripped out half of it so both systems would have the same. Who wins anyway? The MP by about 70% every test.

[533MHz 512MB G4 OS X] / [633MHz 128MB $399 Compaq Celeron WinXP] times: startup 102s/41s...login 19s/6s...launch IE 10s/3s...scrolling a PDF 50s/33s...shutdown 36s/19s.

"Truth is, the G4 is little more than a G3 with a slightly better math section and an internal graphics coprocessor (AltiVec)."

Don't forget this, too.

And you confuse reality with advertising. The only advantage the G4 has over the Athlon is the Altivec unit. But if you take a Pentium 4, for example, you have SSE2, which is similar to the Altivec (and runs faster). And very few programs actually make good use of the Altivec. AMD will add SSE2 support to the Opteron, BTW.

If you compare the MHz, the G4 is indeed much faster than a Pentium 4, and perhaps even slightly faster than an Athlon (5-10%). But the problem is, the G4 is still stuck at 1 GHz. Athlons now run at 2 GHz and P4s at 3 GHz. And, for each MHz, the G4 is definitely not 3 times faster than a P4. Memory and bus bandwidth are also much bigger in PCs, especially if you use RDRAM or dual-channel DDR333 / DDR400.

Digital Video Editing magazine ran some tests on After Effects some time ago. I submitted the link to Slashdot but apparently it wasn't considered relevant, so they never posted it. Lots of other sites did. You can find it here. You can also see plenty of Lightwave benchmarks here.

Apple is simply no loger competitive in markets that require top processing power (ex., rendering, video, scientific research). That doesn't mean Macs can't be good home computers (especially for non-techies), but there's no point in making such obviously false statements as "Macs are faster than PCs". It only makes Mac users sound like a bunch of fanatics.

Macs are not faster than PCs. But in most cases they don't need to be.

Scorecard uses "iComp"

"The iCOMP value is the weighted geometric mean of four benhcmarks;

ZD(Ziff-Davis) Bench - 68% 16-bit Whetstone - 2% SPECint92 - 25% SPECfp92 - 5%"

"Scorecard" shows the G4 and Athlon 2600 dead even at 89% of the fastest processor, The P4 2.8. That is sort of funny, considering ZD bench which represents 68% of the weighted mean of iComp is not available on the Mac.

Here are some additional resources using more modern benchmarks:

Benchmarks using Spec2000 instead of the woefully obsolete Spec92.

Comparison of The Dual G4 to other platforms in after effects rendering

Here is some raw data from the obsolete 16-bit Whetstone which shows the G4 not even able to match a Pentium II clock for clock.

This comparison shows how the G4 compares to a variety of rivals.

This shows that under most conditions, the SDR equiped Dual G4 is faster than than the DDR version. Meaning the 1.25 GHz G4 is crippled with DDR. Which means the numbers from the other benchmark links will not scale linearly. The Dual 1.25 G4 is actualy slower clock for clock than the G4 with SDR.

Also refrence Ars Technica's Seti benchmark showing that a Dual G4 1 Ghz produces work units at the same speed that a Dual PIII 1 Ghz.

Has anyone found any other Benchmark comparisons of the G4 (besides the single photoshop benchmark on Apple's website) that might shed some light on the debate?

So, choose whatever platform you like, but be informed about what you are paying for.

You buy a mac, you buy it because you like OS X, which is far and away the nicest OS out there right now. You do not buy a mac because of performance, as anyone who follows the links can very plainly see.

lying fucking mac zealot shithead. you lie, your argument is rife with proofless lousy conjecture and you cant read a SPEC mark. CPU2000, butffucker. Even Sun manages to do at least Half Assed there, unlike MOT-PPC, which CANT EVEN SHOW UP. HAHAHAHAHA lol. fucking losers. MOT-PPC is dead.

Zealot. You are a lying Zealot. I have a G3 no one wanted. I got OS 10.2 running. It sucks ass, and G3 are slower than pig-shit. The OS is not Unix power user friendly. Its packaging system is HORRIBLE. You don't know what you are talking about - AT ALL.

http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/

Go here to see it G4-1000, spec INT of 306 (SPEC-CPU2000), P3-1000 spec INT of 309. Hhahaha.

Dual G4 1000 Macs are getting DESTROYED by a SINGLE P4 in benchmarks. Zealots, deny this one. http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs said this week that his company would consider moving to Intel chips, but that he would wait until at least 2003 because the transition to Mac OS X was more important. But with the speed of Power PC hardware increasingly falling behind Intel's chips--The Pentium 4 will hit 3 GHz this year--Apple would be wise to do a bit of research. I recommend AMD's upcoming 64-bit Opteron, which will give Apple a technological leg up on Windows and, perhaps, offer them Windows compatibility through the Opteron's full compatibility with 32-bit x86 code. Come on, Apple: Do the right thing." Read the blurb on WinInformant. Read more for a short commentary.

"The dual Athlon is still the fastest PC we've tested, but the single Intel P4 2.53 GHz machine runs a close second, and even beats the dual Athlon on some of the tests. And, as expected, the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up with these two PCs. Even though the P4 machine has only a single processor, it was easy for it to leave the dual-processor Mac far behind." Read the benchmarks at DigitalVideoEditing.

A quick comparison, when using the better compilers for the x86 CPUs:

Integer Results:

Athlon 1666 (2000+) : 697

P4 2200 : 790

G4 1000 : 306

PIII 667 : 310

Floating Point Results:

Athlon 1666 : 596

P4 2200 : 779

G4 1000: 187

PIII 667 : 222

For the people who argue that Altivec was not enabled. This is true, but it is also unfair.

The compiler they used, gcc 2.95.2, doesn't know how to use MMX or SSE either, and barely knows how to use the PPro floating-point instructions FCOMI and FCMOVcc.

Fuck those Mongoloid retards. Never in my life have I seen a royal fuckup as them not being able to whip MSFT ass with OS X. But they had to fuck-face try to be a hardware vendor in a world of cheap chink knockoffs (where the hardware is commoditized to the point where there is little quality variance) where even Compaq died and shriveled up. Fucking idiots.

"Will Microsoft dump Mac support? Two firms slag off each other By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 12:22 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4485

"Apple profits halve in Q2 Jobs predicts flatness ahead By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

" "bait and switch." Apple: Apple to Unveil .Mac Today Posted by pudge on Wednesday July 17, @04:31AM Steve Mason writes "Apple has put up a .Mac FAQ up here proving that .Mac will indeed be introduced at Mac World New York. .Mac will cost $100 a year as previous rumors had reported." Yes, this means that if you don't pay Apple, your mac.com URL and email address will stop working. Some have suggested that the "switch" in Apple's new ad campaign stands for the unfortunate part of a "bait and switch." Someone should mirror that URL, it might be taken down any second now.



http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/1 7/ 1134213&mode=nested&tid=107

Zealots. He used the word "magic" and excused unethical business practice, ignore their plunging profits and growing customer dissatisfaction, their complete loss of the educations market only to have their stake in things being upheld by horn-rimmed-glass wearing elitist "artists" and "musicians" who have to make it look like if you create art or music on anything but a Mac its amateurish and unprofessional because they don't know what the fuck they are doing and are being shown up by talented/poor people with PCs.

I have *never* met a Mac user that has taught me one things about computing. Ever.

Steve Jobs is egotistical, and he chose to not take on XP head to head with OS X. Now OS X is relegated to a niche processor, once Adobe and MSFT pull the plug (notice Adobe took considerable time to get OS X versions of their stuff out the door with CALL-HOME on all their apps for the Mac) there wont be much to speak of in terms of software. If OS X was for x86, there would be sex appeal, the would make more money and the x86 would finally get an Open Firmware and a vendor with a deep respect for building the right things (an the wrong video chipsets) on the motherboards.

The Apple ][ was it for them. After that, the TRASH-80 seems like a holy crusade.

I have a G3 here beside me, and I can't upgrade the CPU officially, they wont give a 4.X firmware for it, so much for OPEN-firmware, its slow as fucking SHIT with this horribly slow clock and HALF SPEED cache, and there is no SCSI. It's a PC with a slow CPU.

I never had any intention of running MacOSX server on it. Instead I wanted to run NetBSD.

The Xserve uses Motorola 7455 processor with 2MB of L3 cache and PC2100 RAM. Unfortunately, even though this is a "server" class machine, Apple skimped and did not allow you to use ECC memory. For a datacenter machine, this seems remarkably short sighted.

While the machine is quick, it still lags behind the high-end P4 and Athlon's when it comes to doing NetBSD builds. It is slightly slower the same speed as 1.4GHz Athlon.

If you need a lot of powerpc computing in a small form factor, the Xserve is a nice box but x86 still has it beat when it comes to price/performance.

One last thing, the Xserve is exceptionally loud. Granted it is a 1U box but it is louder than other 1U I've ever heard.

After having a (single CPU) Xserve to play for the past week, I thought I'd try to interject some of my experience with it.

I have to say that the Xserve is not the first dual processor RISC 1U machine. The Alpha powered CS20 precedes by well over a year (which can have two 833MHz 21264 (EV67) cpus).

Note: The Dell 1650 and 2650 are both cheaper, the 2650 has SMT, and ECC (and nice linux

ecc support as well, it logs ECC errors in syslog). They also include onboard RAID(option

via 7899 asic) and a U160 AIC-7899 by default. And you can buy retail CPUs and retail

memory for Dells often at half the price without voiding the warranty.

Apple charges $500 per 120GB EIDE drive. HAHAHAHA.

Apple is right about one thing, that Alpha has existed for some time, but have you ever

tried actually buying an Alpha? Its hard, I know an engineer who works for

DEC->/Compaq->/HP, and I was dying to buy one, and he couldnt find anyone to call me

about getting one.

Apple's New 1U servers: Sorry. Doesn't fit well in a market where the Dell 1550/1650 and

2550 and 2650 exist. Sorry. THEY DON'T PUBLISH SPEC numbers. Apple is a dying breed, I

just recently tried to revive my interest in them only to be disappointed. The Motorola

PPC architecture is embarrassingly slow, and they always are quick to point out the

near-useless Altivec and some obscure filter in Photoshop, but its not true. I have a Mac,

several PCs and a SPARC at *home*, so trust me people, this box is a bore. And OS X and

Open ClosedROM make putting regular memory, disks and CPU upgrades NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE, they

try to block it so you have to buy the same part from them 3x the cost. And the Dell 530

Dual P4-Xeon with SMT buries the fastest Mac by almost a factor of two.

OS X is no great shakes as of yet because even though most of the porting off of Classic

has been done, there are annoying remnants of classic everywhere, including a gamut of

Apple utilities. These are notoriously the worst Administrator-unfriendly boxes in the

industry, and I have used a few boxen in my time. OS X's Darwin kernel will be sorely

eclipsed by Linux 2.6, and 2.4.X is already superior in all the ways I can tell (This isnt

to say BSD it bad, but I dont think this OS demands a PREMIUM). I tried YellowDog, Madrake

and Debian on PPC as well, and they ran (even with aggressive G3 optimizations) rather

poorly - but interestingly far faster than native OS X.

This is a dying gasp of air from a dead Unix vendor, who has had to turn themselves into a

Microsoft VAR (most popular Mac Application: Microsoft Office X).

If you have an insatiable fetish for PPC, DON'T. Wait for Hammer. Remind yourself about

SMT, and 2.8GHz clock speeds before you go pay for obsolete/deprecated silicon. And the

term RISC? Pathetic.

I happily resell our product on a 1650 and 2650. We "configured" a Mac box

because we were genuinely curious. We laughed at the final price and moved on.

This isn't a troll, or a flame - its reality. What this box does can be done with a 1650,

with redundant power supplies, with SCSI and hardware raid build ON BOARD, dual gigabit

NICs onboard, dual 1400 MHZ/512cache Tualatin (with SPEC numbers to gauge the performance

by) (2650 gets high clock Xeons), two 64bit/66Mhz slots, onboard video, console

redirection, USB, etc. And for half the price. And you can use retail Intel CPUs,(cheap),

retail hard drives (if you don't want to buy the Dell ones at a modest premium), and

retail Crucial.com memory (the same memory Dell uses for Half the price). All in all, you

get a box, for half the price, with twice the features and performance. And this is coming

from a person who doesn't even LIKE Dell. (I feel I can always build better more reliable

systems than most of the PC vendors.)

BBBBBBZT. Apple, you lost, you lost, you will always be niche because OS X isn't where it

needs to be - on an X86.

TO give a better link for you, since you will have trouble finding this on your own, I'll put you right where you need to be to see Motorola PPC chips are, well, so horrible they wont publish industry standard Specmarks.

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000. ht ml

Sorry. Apple. Steve Jobs keeps them in business but his ego is trash. I know people who work there, personally . You pay for his ego.

Ok. Publish your findings. No, I didnt think so. So its as conjective as my assertations,

which are based on my whim in addition to evideince (or lacktherof), and the reading of

the CPU Report, EE Times, etc. I'm into this industry, and unless you are a zealot, you

would know PPC is IBM now. Motorola is in the dirt.

Bzzt. I like NeXT. Ahead of its time, over priced. Darwin is useless, I have 1.4.1, its

crap. OS X is nice looking, but it is *very* easy to "piss" the system off, its

package manager is so bad compared to RPM I wont even start, and it is, as as what I

consider a *nix to be, wholly inadequate and incomplete. Next.

About being content free, thats a snarky, trollish accusation. Now why dont you use Purify

on yourself and remove all the said cruft and actually say something in Apple's defense

besides naming Mach 3.0+ (like if it was 5.0+ would it make a shit bit of difference.) I

hate zealotry.

And about computing pleasure. This isnt fafenugen or a driving experience, dude, its about

stuff WORKING, well, for the lowest cost with the cheapest parts. There is no sex appeal

in server administration.

Funny, everytime I have gone to a Mac shop they have, for as long as I can ever remember,

always, ALWAYS had NT based servers. Unilaterally.

And I saw a few Mac shops in my time in New York.

You know what, not that I like NT, but they worked more reliably (generally Compaq

servers) than the Macs did. (Mostly these days non parity memory and no SCSI anymore, its

Funny. When I run a linux or *nix or NT based server I dont have a .DOC reader installed.

Ever. Maybe a PDF reader if I can't figure something out using google, a few nesgroups and

other better-than-manuals-and-man-page sources.

For those wondering why .DOC is still a problem, I have noticed that documents shared even

between Office X, XP and 2002 are very inconsistent. Its MSFT playing the upgrade me to

fix problems game. For complicated layout and manuals, use Framaker or a LaTeX backended

application or something realistic.

As far as OS X being "young", I think its probably the oldest feeling Unix there

is. Old kernel, old Unix specification (I happen to like what I find in a SYS V style /etc) and old binaries included without gcc in the default install. Its only young in that

Apple does not know very well how to serve people who use unix.

I gave OS X a fair shot on a G3 with 1GB of memory. Its good. I wated to use it instead of

Microsoft crap for home use, but I wouldnt switch from Win2k after that. They also block

CPU upgrade cards, which are expensive. They try to block 3rd party memory. The included

keyboard and mouse always sucks. And they try not to partition non-apple drives with Drive

Setup, which is the WORST partitioning utility, and Apple's partition maps are screwed up

and stupid, and trying to run OS X without classic is diffcult because so many fools still

have ported thier stuff to OS X.

I'll stick to PCs for home computing, and think about other vendors for servers.

IS MICROSOFT CONTEMPLATING ditching support for Apple Macs?

That's the thrust of an article that appeared on Wininfo a day or two back, but if

Microsoft is getting out of the Mac market, it's not quite yet.

And all is not well in other respects, reports Mac Rumors, which has posted what it says

is an Apple FAQ saying people will have to pay for .mac accounts.

Microsoft has already prepared a press release to time with the Macworld Expo saying that

it has announced a Microsoft Office V.x "triple header", this being an

announcement which offers better mobility with Palm handheld for Entourage X, a way to buy

Office v.X cheaper, and some Windows compatibility with the RDC client.

The Wininfo article, however, quotes Kevin Browne, who runs the Mac Business Unit at

Microsoft as saying Apple hasn't made much of an effort to promote Mac OSX, even though

there are opportunities.

He is quoted as saying that "if things don't dramatically turn round", it might

be Goodnight Mr Chips for Steve Jobs firm.

But the same article says that Apple blames Microsoft for sales problems with Office

v.X.

Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates have traditionally had a somewhat strained relationship.

Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end between the two companies?

Wininfo.

Mac Rumors is providing a blow-by-blow account of what's happening at MacExpo on the site

link above - it seems Apple may well announce support for Nforce 2, too.

On the Nvidia site, here, you'll see that Digital Vibrance Control is "currently

unavailable on Mac systems", which is more than just a hint, we guess.

*JOBS KICKS off MacWorld Expo at the Javitz Center at 09:00 Eastern time. There will be a

live Webcast using Quicktime, natch, here.

This is a good start (the buying public is sending a message to Apple, how do the intend

to GROW thier market share????????)

Apple profits halve in Q2

Jobs preducts flatness ahead

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05

APPLE MADE A NET profit of $32 million for its third quarter, almost half the profit it

made in the same period last year, and turnover fell three per cent to $1.43 billion

compared to the quarter in 2001.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum= 60 839

TITLE Firmware Update: Firmware Updates 4.1.7 and Later May Disable Out-of-Spec Third-Party RAM Article ID: Created: Modified: 60839 4/12/01 9/28/01

Read up. Apple is trying to make it harder and harder to use "out of spec" hahahaha memory. Luckily www.crucial.com always works. But imagine, a firmware update that DISABLES YOUR MEMORY.

Apple tried to block G3 owners from upgrading to G4. Nice guys.

PowerForce G4 ZIF

The PowerForce G4 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) is the only G4 CPU upgrade you will want to upgrade your "Beige" Power Mac G3, "G3 All-in-One" educational model, Blue and White G3's and the Yikes Motherboard Graphite G4's. The PowerForce G4 ZIF is one of the highest performance CPU products when used with "AltiVec enhanced" software. Utilizing the second generation PowerPC 7410 processor ("G4") the PowerForce G4 includes a full 1 megabyte of backside cache running at up to 220MHz.

G4 ZIF Upgrade vs. 800MHz G4 Apple: PowerForce ZIF G4 550/220/1MB Apple G4 733 Price $289 $1599

The Bottom Line: If you already have quite a bit invested in your Power Mac G3, it just makes sense to upgrade the processor rather than opting for the new G4 systems from Apple. Apple has finally eliminated all of the legacy ports with the removal of the ADB port on the new G4 systems, not to mention the removal of the serial ports, and SCSI on the Blue and White G3 systems. So the choice is clear. PowerLogix saves you hundreds of dollars over the cost of buying a new system!

PowerLogix was the first to release a solution for the G4 ROM block for Blue and White G3s.

Bruising by Apple

Roland Miller III

One notable fact concerning Apple's customer base is that it has always tested very highly in the category of brand loyalty. "Once a Mac user, always a Mac user." Apple has depended on this customer loyalty to get it through some rough times. It could always count on a portion of the market to continue to buy Apple products and continue to upgrade with Apple products. Despite (or perhaps due to) this loyalty, Apple has subjected its customers to some decidedly anti-customer abuses.

The latest example of Apple bruising its customers is a doozy. Due to shortages of the higher speed G4 processors, Apple speed reduced its entire line by 50 MHz and kept the prices the same. On top of that, Apple unilaterally cancelled all outstanding G4 orders with instructions that customers should reorder their systems. This has the net effect of increasing everyone's cost for the same system.

Needless to say, this action produced a massive and immediate customer backlash. Based on what I have seen on the net, this uproar lasted a few hours before Apple backed down and started to rejoin reality. After about a day of total confusion and rampant rumors followed by a week of small clarifications, Apple made right and reinstated all G4 orders except the high end 500 MHz model. Those customers were offered the choice of purchasing the "new" 450 MHz model at the original 450 MHz price, which is what should have been done in the first place.

While it is possible for me to see some corporate logic behind the original decision, never the less, this bright idea should not have left the meeting room where it was hatched. It doesn't take an MBA (obviously) to predict the firestorm that was touched off when this decision was implemented. The only positive thing I can see in this fiasco was the speed at which corrective steps were implemented. The corporation responded to its customer's will and proved somewhat nimble in the process.

Another recent example of Apple bruising was with AppleShare IP 6.2. Apple decided to charge several hundred dollars for this upgrade (the previous being 6.1.) The only problem was that aside from a few new features, it was mainly seen as a bug-fix and compatibility upgrade for MacOS 8.6 (which itself was a free upgrade to 8.5.1.) You couldn't run ASIP 6.1 on 8.6 and you couldn't run the upgrade on 8.5. Again, the reaction was very predictable: customer outrage. Apple listened to its customers and eventually made 6.2 a free update to 6.1.

You may have also have heard about Apple purposefully preventing G3 owners from installing G4 CPU upgrades with a firmware upgrade that officially solved another problem. People were again outraged when the rumor was confirmed by all of the CPU upgrade companies. The outrage keyed on false advertising and speculation that Apple released a Trojan horse.

There were unofficial rumors from anonymous Apple employees that this firmware block will be removed with Mac OS 9. However, there has been no official word from Apple concerning this issue. In the meantime, all the CPU upgrade companies have announced that they have gotten around the block and that their respective upgrade will work fine when they ship.

While Apple has responded favorably to two of these examples, all of these misfires do take a toll. Many people simply will not tolerate this sort of behavior from a major corporation. A company simply cannot afford to make too many of these types of decisions and still remain in business.

Ultimately what can be learned from these examples?

The perception of the "bottom-line" doesn't always coincide with the needs of the consumer resulting in corporate mistakes of judgment. Some of them can be bad enough to make the pages of the Laramie Daily Boomerang. I can't speculate on whether these bad decisions were based on stupidity or on over estimating the loyalty of AppleÕs customers or both. Apple has taken concrete steps in most of these cases to defuse the situation. As long as Apple continues to admit that it is wrong and make things right immediately, I will still tolerate being one of its customers.

Until next time. . .

It wasn't meant to be a troll. And thank you for your honesty.

I gave OS X a fair shake. I have many machines at home and with Gnucleus I was able to get

just about every Mac app compiled native for OS X in existence. (Thank god I wont be

keeping any of them or buying any of them - try before you buy, people)

I have to say that the total lack of incumbent middleware is horrible with OS X. Its

barely an OS out of the box. I hate having to boot from a CD to manage anything, and its

multiboot handling is inferior. The Norton set of tools is pathetically weak for the

money. Office X is admittedly excellent. But that's it. IE was mentioned not too long ago

as rendering incorrectly and having a huge security flaw that is fixed in 5.2.1, but the

response from MSFT took much longer than they do for x86.

If OS X was ported to x86 (looks like it has) I would buy it. Period. Forget buying a PPC

ripp off machine though.

I noticed on the OS X cd there is i386 directories littering the place and Darwin

(hahahah) works on like one computer with an intel chip deep in the belly of Apple, but

they are not trying to make Darwin/X86 more appealing than ANY ANY of the other BSDs, they

all destroy Darwin in usability, even when you get Darwin from

http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/.

I came, I saw, I mastered it, I left. Its BORING.

And as far as IPFW. IPF for OpenBSD is out. and there are no decent APP-firewalls for OS X

(Firewalk sucks), Brickhouse is a joke of a GUI.

I am thinking Kerio Winroute/Personal Firewall as a base comparison. The fact nothing

analogous exists in Mac OS X land make this platform more unusable. Also, if Apple like

fit and finish on Unix, why dont they make the more complicated things useable through

GUI (like Brickhouse did for IPF). Noo, the only people Apple caters to is those who die

their hair purple and sucks on pacifier and laugh at baby rattles while they are e-tarded

from their last bout with Xtasy after the cool rave for mac zealots.

: We can forget about this because its a pipe dream and it wont ever happen and it wont ever happen because its a pipe dream.

I think its clear its a pipe dream, we can forget about it because its a pipedreamery factory pumping out pipes and dreams.

: PIPE DREAM

: openfirmware is worst

its like you get a command line

: anything apple is worse

: its poop

: of something worse than unuseable

: you can run like 10 OSes on a pc

: well even suns have openfirmware

: its not like clear why its good

: crapple is like 3 oses, tops

: alpha SRM is good

: linBIOS (pipe Dream) would be good

: repairing remote filesystems over the network isnt gay

: like a real SRM would let you do

: but not going to happen in PC LAND

: its a pipe dream

: and openfirmware, while technically correct, is CRAP

: FUCKING CRAP

: zzzz

: it is

: its all crap

: like IOS is better for a boot loader

: but crapple is the crap of the crap

: cream of the crap

: creamy pussy

: nasty dirty

: creaming crud

Or unless you care about doing things at the speed at which PCs did them in 1999-2000. Macs are so god aawful slow and overpriced, I cant believe anyone who can forulate a sentece would advocate for them

I have a treatment to follow which addresses your deuded zealot lies.

Zealot. You are a lying Zealot. I have a G3 no one wanted. I got OS 10.2 running. It sucks ass, and G3 are slower than pig-shit. The OS is not Unix power user friendly. Its packaging system is HORRIBLE. You don't know what you are talking about - AT ALL.

http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/
Go here to see it G4-1000, spec INT of 306 (SPEC-CPU2000), P3-1000 spec INT of 309. Hhahaha.

Dual G4 1000 Macs are getting DESTROYED by a SINGLE P4 in benchmarks. Zealots, deny this one. http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs said this week that his company would consider moving to Intel chips, but that he would wait until at least 2003 because the transition to Mac OS X was more important. But with the speed of Power PC hardware increasingly falling behind Intel's chips--The Pentium 4 will hit 3 GHz this year--Apple would be wise to do a bit of research. I recommend AMD's upcoming 64-bit Opteron, which will give Apple a technological leg up on Windows and, perhaps, offer them Windows compatibility through the Opteron's full compatibility with 32-bit x86 code. Come on, Apple: Do the right thing." Read the blurb on WinInformant. Read more for a short commentary.

"The dual Athlon is still the fastest PC we've tested, but the single Intel P4 2.53 GHz machine runs a close second, and even beats the dual Athlon on some of the tests. And, as expected, the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up with these two PCs. Even though the P4 machine has only a single processor, it was easy for it to leave the dual-processor Mac far behind." Read the benchmarks at DigitalVideoEditing.

A quick comparison, when using the better compilers for the x86 CPUs:

Integer Results:
Athlon 1666 (2000+) : 697
P4 2200 : 790
G4 1000 : 306
PIII 667 : 310

Floating Point Results:
Athlon 1666 : 596
P4 2200 : 779
G4 1000: 187
PIII 667 : 222

For the people who argue that Altivec was not enabled. This is true, but it is also unfair.

The compiler they used, gcc 2.95.2, doesn't know how to use MMX or SSE either, and barely knows how to use the PPro floating-point instructions FCOMI and FCMOVcc.

Fuck those Mongoloid retards. Never in my life have I seen a royal fuckup as them not being able to whip MSFT ass with OS X. But they had to fuck-face try to be a hardware vendor in a world of cheap chink knockoffs (where the hardware is commoditized to the point where there is little quality variance) where even Compaq died and shriveled up. Fucking idiots.

"Will Microsoft dump Mac support? Two firms slag off each other By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 12:22 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4485

"Apple profits halve in Q2 Jobs predicts flatness ahead By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

" "bait and switch." Apple: Apple to Unveil .Mac Today Posted by pudge on Wednesday July 17, @04:31AM Steve Mason writes "Apple has put up a .Mac FAQ up here proving that .Mac will indeed be introduced at Mac World New York. .Mac will cost $100 a year as previous rumors had reported." Yes, this means that if you don't pay Apple, your mac.com URL and email address will stop working. Some have suggested that the "switch" in Apple's new ad campaign stands for the unfortunate part of a "bait and switch." Someone should mirror that URL, it might be taken down any second now.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/1 7/ 1134213&mode=nested&tid=107

Zealots. He used the word "magic" and excused unethical business practice, ignore their plunging profits and growing customer dissatisfaction, their complete loss of the educations market only to have their stake in things being upheld by horn-rimmed-glass wearing elitist "artists" and "musicians" who have to make it look like if you create art or music on anything but a Mac its amateurish and unprofessional because they don't know what the fuck they are doing and are being shown up by talented/poor people with PCs.

I have *never* met a Mac user that has taught me one things about computing. Ever.

Steve Jobs is egotistical, and he chose to not take on XP head to head with OS X. Now OS X is relegated to a niche processor, once Adobe and MSFT pull the plug (notice Adobe took considerable time to get OS X versions of their stuff out the door with CALL-HOME on all their apps for the Mac) there wont be much to speak of in terms of software. If OS X was for x86, there would be sex appeal, the would make more money and the x86 would finally get an Open Firmware and a vendor with a deep respect for building the right things (an the wrong video chipsets) on the motherboards.

The Apple ][ was it for them. After that, the TRASH-80 seems like a holy crusade.

I have a G3 here beside me, and I can't upgrade the CPU officially, they wont give a 4.X firmware for it, so much for OPEN-firmware, its slow as fucking SHIT with this horribly slow clock and HALF SPEED cache, and there is no SCSI. It's a PC with a slow CPU.

I never had any intention of running MacOSX server on it. Instead I wanted to run NetBSD.

The Xserve uses Motorola 7455 processor with 2MB of L3 cache and PC2100 RAM. Unfortunately, even though this is a "server" class machine, Apple skimped and did not allow you to use ECC memory. For a datacenter machine, this seems remarkably short sighted.

While the machine is quick, it still lags behind the high-end P4 and Athlon's when it comes to doing NetBSD builds. It is slightly slower the same speed as 1.4GHz Athlon.

If you need a lot of powerpc computing in a small form factor, the Xserve is a nice box but x86 still has it beat when it comes to price/performance.

One last thing, the Xserve is exceptionally loud. Granted it is a 1U box but it is louder than other 1U I've ever heard.

After having a (single CPU) Xserve to play for the past week, I thought I'd try to interject some of my experience with it.
I have to say that the Xserve is not the first dual processor RISC 1U machine. The Alpha powered CS20 precedes by well over a year (which can have two 833MHz 21264 (EV67) cpus).

Note: The Dell 1650 and 2650 are both cheaper, the 2650 has SMT, and ECC (and nice linux
ecc support as well, it logs ECC errors in syslog). They also include onboard RAID(option
via 7899 asic) and a U160 AIC-7899 by default. And you can buy retail CPUs and retail
memory for Dells often at half the price without voiding the warranty.

Apple charges $500 per 120GB EIDE drive. HAHAHAHA.

Apple is right about one thing, that Alpha has existed for some time, but have you ever
tried actually buying an Alpha? Its hard, I know an engineer who works for
DEC->/Compaq->/HP, and I was dying to buy one, and he couldnt find anyone to call me
about getting one.

Apple's New 1U servers: Sorry. Doesn't fit well in a market where the Dell 1550/1650 and
2550 and 2650 exist. Sorry. THEY DON'T PUBLISH SPEC numbers. Apple is a dying breed, I
just recently tried to revive my interest in them only to be disappointed. The Motorola
PPC architecture is embarrassingly slow, and they always are quick to point out the
near-useless Altivec and some obscure filter in Photoshop, but its not true. I have a Mac,
several PCs and a SPARC at *home*, so trust me people, this box is a bore. And OS X and
Open ClosedROM make putting regular memory, disks and CPU upgrades NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE, they
try to block it so you have to buy the same part from them 3x the cost. And the Dell 530
Dual P4-Xeon with SMT buries the fastest Mac by almost a factor of two.
OS X is no great shakes as of yet because even though most of the porting off of Classic
has been done, there are annoying remnants of classic everywhere, including a gamut of
Apple utilities. These are notoriously the worst Administrator-unfriendly boxes in the
industry, and I have used a few boxen in my time. OS X's Darwin kernel will be sorely
eclipsed by Linux 2.6, and 2.4.X is already superior in all the ways I can tell (This isnt
to say BSD it bad, but I dont think this OS demands a PREMIUM). I tried YellowDog, Madrake
and Debian on PPC as well, and they ran (even with aggressive G3 optimizations) rather
poorly - but interestingly far faster than native OS X.
This is a dying gasp of air from a dead Unix vendor, who has had to turn themselves into a
Microsoft VAR (most popular Mac Application: Microsoft Office X).
If you have an insatiable fetish for PPC, DON'T. Wait for Hammer. Remind yourself about
SMT, and 2.8GHz clock speeds before you go pay for obsolete/deprecated silicon. And the
term RISC? Pathetic.
I happily resell our product on a 1650 and 2650. We "configured" a Mac box
because we were genuinely curious. We laughed at the final price and moved on.
This isn't a troll, or a flame - its reality. What this box does can be done with a 1650,
with redundant power supplies, with SCSI and hardware raid build ON BOARD, dual gigabit
NICs onboard, dual 1400 MHZ/512cache Tualatin (with SPEC numbers to gauge the performance
by) (2650 gets high clock Xeons), two 64bit/66Mhz slots, onboard video, console
redirection, USB, etc. And for half the price. And you can use retail Intel CPUs,(cheap),
retail hard drives (if you don't want to buy the Dell ones at a modest premium), and
retail Crucial.com memory (the same memory Dell uses for Half the price). All in all, you
get a box, for half the price, with twice the features and performance. And this is coming
from a person who doesn't even LIKE Dell. (I feel I can always build better more reliable
systems than most of the PC vendors.)
BBBBBBZT. Apple, you lost, you lost, you will always be niche because OS X isn't where it
needs to be - on an X86.

TO give a better link for you, since you will have trouble finding this on your own, I'll put you right where you need to be to see Motorola PPC chips are, well, so horrible they wont publish industry standard Specmarks.
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000. ht ml

Sorry. Apple. Steve Jobs keeps them in business but his ego is trash. I know people who work there, personally . You pay for his ego.

Ok. Publish your findings. No, I didnt think so. So its as conjective as my assertations,
which are based on my whim in addition to evideince (or lacktherof), and the reading of
the CPU Report, EE Times, etc. I'm into this industry, and unless you are a zealot, you
would know PPC is IBM now. Motorola is in the dirt.

Bzzt. I like NeXT. Ahead of its time, over priced. Darwin is useless, I have 1.4.1, its
crap. OS X is nice looking, but it is *very* easy to "piss" the system off, its
package manager is so bad compared to RPM I wont even start, and it is, as as what I
consider a *nix to be, wholly inadequate and incomplete. Next.

About being content free, thats a snarky, trollish accusation. Now why dont you use Purify
on yourself and remove all the said cruft and actually say something in Apple's defense
besides naming Mach 3.0+ (like if it was 5.0+ would it make a shit bit of difference.) I
hate zealotry.

And about computing pleasure. This isnt fafenugen or a driving experience, dude, its about
stuff WORKING, well, for the lowest cost with the cheapest parts. There is no sex appeal
in server administration.

Funny, everytime I have gone to a Mac shop they have, for as long as I can ever remember,
always, ALWAYS had NT based servers. Unilaterally.

And I saw a few Mac shops in my time in New York.

You know what, not that I like NT, but they worked more reliably (generally Compaq
servers) than the Macs did. (Mostly these days non parity memory and no SCSI anymore, its

Funny. When I run a linux or *nix or NT based server I dont have a .DOC reader installed.
Ever. Maybe a PDF reader if I can't figure something out using google, a few nesgroups and
other better-than-manuals-and-man-page sources.

For those wondering why .DOC is still a problem, I have noticed that documents shared even
between Office X, XP and 2002 are very inconsistent. Its MSFT playing the upgrade me to
fix problems game. For complicated layout and manuals, use Framaker or a LaTeX backended
application or something realistic.

As far as OS X being "young", I think its probably the oldest feeling Unix there
is. Old kernel, old Unix specification (I happen to like what I find in a SYS V style /etc) and old binaries included without gcc in the default install. Its only young in that
Apple does not know very well how to serve people who use unix.

I gave OS X a fair shot on a G3 with 1GB of memory. Its good. I wated to use it instead of
Microsoft crap for home use, but I wouldnt switch from Win2k after that. They also block
CPU upgrade cards, which are expensive. They try to block 3rd party memory. The included
keyboard and mouse always sucks. And they try not to partition non-apple drives with Drive
Setup, which is the WORST partitioning utility, and Apple's partition maps are screwed up
and stupid, and trying to run OS X without classic is diffcult because so many fools still
have ported thier stuff to OS X.

I'll stick to PCs for home computing, and think about other vendors for servers.

IS MICROSOFT CONTEMPLATING ditching support for Apple Macs?
That's the thrust of an article that appeared on Wininfo a day or two back, but if
Microsoft is getting out of the Mac market, it's not quite yet.

And all is not well in other respects, reports Mac Rumors, which has posted what it says
is an Apple FAQ saying people will have to pay for .mac accounts.

Microsoft has already prepared a press release to time with the Macworld Expo saying that
it has announced a Microsoft Office V.x "triple header", this being an
announcement which offers better mobility with Palm handheld for Entourage X, a way to buy
Office v.X cheaper, and some Windows compatibility with the RDC client.

The Wininfo article, however, quotes Kevin Browne, who runs the Mac Business Unit at
Microsoft as saying Apple hasn't made much of an effort to promote Mac OSX, even though
there are opportunities.

He is quoted as saying that "if things don't dramatically turn round", it might
be Goodnight Mr Chips for Steve Jobs firm.

But the same article says that Apple blames Microsoft for sales problems with Office
v.X.

Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates have traditionally had a somewhat strained relationship.
Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end between the two companies?

Wininfo.

Mac Rumors is providing a blow-by-blow account of what's happening at MacExpo on the site
link above - it seems Apple may well announce support for Nforce 2, too.

On the Nvidia site, here, you'll see that Digital Vibrance Control is "currently
unavailable on Mac systems", which is more than just a hint, we guess.

*JOBS KICKS off MacWorld Expo at the Javitz Center at 09:00 Eastern time. There will be a
live Webcast using Quicktime, natch, here.

This is a good start (the buying public is sending a message to Apple, how do the intend
to GROW thier market share????????)

Apple profits halve in Q2

Jobs preducts flatness ahead

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05

APPLE MADE A NET profit of $32 million for its third quarter, almost half the profit it
made in the same period last year, and turnover fell three per cent to $1.43 billion
compared to the quarter in 2001.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum= 60 839
TITLE Firmware Update: Firmware Updates 4.1.7 and Later May Disable Out-of-Spec Third-Party RAM Article ID: Created: Modified: 60839 4/12/01 9/28/01

Read up. Apple is trying to make it harder and harder to use "out of spec" hahahaha memory. Luckily www.crucial.com always works. But imagine, a firmware update that DISABLES YOUR MEMORY.

Apple tried to block G3 owners from upgrading to G4. Nice guys.
PowerForce G4 ZIF

The PowerForce G4 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) is the only G4 CPU upgrade you will want to upgrade your "Beige" Power Mac G3, "G3 All-in-One" educational model, Blue and White G3's and the Yikes Motherboard Graphite G4's. The PowerForce G4 ZIF is one of the highest performance CPU products when used with "AltiVec enhanced" software. Utilizing the second generation PowerPC 7410 processor ("G4") the PowerForce G4 includes a full 1 megabyte of backside cache running at up to 220MHz.

G4 ZIF Upgrade vs. 800MHz G4 Apple: PowerForce ZIF G4 550/220/1MB Apple G4 733 Price $289 $1599

The Bottom Line: If you already have quite a bit invested in your Power Mac G3, it just makes sense to upgrade the processor rather than opting for the new G4 systems from Apple. Apple has finally eliminated all of the legacy ports with the removal of the ADB port on the new G4 systems, not to mention the removal of the serial ports, and SCSI on the Blue and White G3 systems. So the choice is clear. PowerLogix saves you hundreds of dollars over the cost of buying a new system!

PowerLogix was the first to release a solution for the G4 ROM block for Blue and White G3s.

Bruising by Apple
Roland Miller III

One notable fact concerning Apple's customer base is that it has always tested very highly in the category of brand loyalty. "Once a Mac user, always a Mac user." Apple has depended on this customer loyalty to get it through some rough times. It could always count on a portion of the market to continue to buy Apple products and continue to upgrade with Apple products. Despite (or perhaps due to) this loyalty, Apple has subjected its customers to some decidedly anti-customer abuses.

The latest example of Apple bruising its customers is a doozy. Due to shortages of the higher speed G4 processors, Apple speed reduced its entire line by 50 MHz and kept the prices the same. On top of that, Apple unilaterally cancelled all outstanding G4 orders with instructions that customers should reorder their systems. This has the net effect of increasing everyone's cost for the same system.

Needless to say, this action produced a massive and immediate customer backlash. Based on what I have seen on the net, this uproar lasted a few hours before Apple backed down and started to rejoin reality. After about a day of total confusion and rampant rumors followed by a week of small clarifications, Apple made right and reinstated all G4 orders except the high end 500 MHz model. Those customers were offered the choice of purchasing the "new" 450 MHz model at the original 450 MHz price, which is what should have been done in the first place.

While it is possible for me to see some corporate logic behind the original decision, never the less, this bright idea should not have left the meeting room where it was hatched. It doesn't take an MBA (obviously) to predict the firestorm that was touched off when this decision was implemented. The only positive thing I can see in this fiasco was the speed at which corrective steps were implemented. The corporation responded to its customer's will and proved somewhat nimble in the process.

Another recent example of Apple bruising was with AppleShare IP 6.2. Apple decided to charge several hundred dollars for this upgrade (the previous being 6.1.) The only problem was that aside from a few new features, it was mainly seen as a bug-fix and compatibility upgrade for MacOS 8.6 (which itself was a free upgrade to 8.5.1.) You couldn't run ASIP 6.1 on 8.6 and you couldn't run the upgrade on 8.5. Again, the reaction was very predictable: customer outrage. Apple listened to its customers and eventually made 6.2 a free update to 6.1.

You may have also have heard about Apple purposefully preventing G3 owners from installing G4 CPU upgrades with a firmware upgrade that officially solved another problem. People were again outraged when the rumor was confirmed by all of the CPU upgrade companies. The outrage keyed on false advertising and speculation that Apple released a Trojan horse.

There were unofficial rumors from anonymous Apple employees that this firmware block will be removed with Mac OS 9. However, there has been no official word from Apple concerning this issue. In the meantime, all the CPU upgrade companies have announced that they have gotten around the block and that their respective upgrade will work fine when they ship.

While Apple has responded favorably to two of these examples, all of these misfires do take a toll. Many people simply will not tolerate this sort of behavior from a major corporation. A company simply cannot afford to make too many of these types of decisions and still remain in business.

Ultimately what can be learned from these examples?

The perception of the "bottom-line" doesn't always coincide with the needs of the consumer resulting in corporate mistakes of judgment. Some of them can be bad enough to make the pages of the Laramie Daily Boomerang. I can't speculate on whether these bad decisions were based on stupidity or on over estimating the loyalty of AppleÕs customers or both. Apple has taken concrete steps in most of these cases to defuse the situation. As long as Apple continues to admit that it is wrong and make things right immediately, I will still tolerate being one of its customers.

Until next time. . .

It wasn't meant to be a troll. And thank you for your honesty.

I gave OS X a fair shake. I have many machines at home and with Gnucleus I was able to get
just about every Mac app compiled native for OS X in existence. (Thank god I wont be
keeping any of them or buying any of them - try before you buy, people)

I have to say that the total lack of incumbent middleware is horrible with OS X. Its
barely an OS out of the box. I hate having to boot from a CD to manage anything, and its
multiboot handling is inferior. The Norton set of tools is pathetically weak for the
money. Office X is admittedly excellent. But that's it. IE was mentioned not too long ago
as rendering incorrectly and having a huge security flaw that is fixed in 5.2.1, but the
response from MSFT took much longer than they do for x86.

If OS X was ported to x86 (looks like it has) I would buy it. Period. Forget buying a PPC
ripp off machine though.

I noticed on the OS X cd there is i386 directories littering the place and Darwin
(hahahah) works on like one computer with an intel chip deep in the belly of Apple, but
they are not trying to make Darwin/X86 more appealing than ANY ANY of the other BSDs, they
all destroy Darwin in usability, even when you get Darwin from
http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/.

I came, I saw, I mastered it, I left. Its BORING.

And as far as IPFW. IPF for OpenBSD is out. and there are no decent APP-firewalls for OS X
(Firewalk sucks), Brickhouse is a joke of a GUI.

I am thinking Kerio Winroute/Personal Firewall as a base comparison. The fact nothing
analogous exists in Mac OS X land make this platform more unusable. Also, if Apple like
fit and finish on Unix, why dont they make the more complicated things useable through
GUI (like Brickhouse did for IPF). Noo, the only people Apple caters to is those who die
their hair purple and sucks on pacifier and laugh at baby rattles while they are e-tarded
from their last bout with Xtasy after the cool rave for mac zealots.

: We can forget about this because its a pipe dream and it wont ever happen and it wont ever happen because its a pipe dream.

I think its clear its a pipe dream, we can forget about it because its a pipedreamery factory pumping out pipes and dreams.

: PIPE DREAM
: openfirmware is worst
its like you get a command line
: anything apple is worse
: its poop
: of something worse than unuseable
: you can run like 10 OSes on a pc
: well even suns have openfirmware
: its not like clear why its good
: crapple is like 3 oses, tops
: alpha SRM is good
: linBIOS (pipe Dream) would be good
: repairing remote filesystems over the network isnt gay
: like a real SRM would let you do
: but not going to happen in PC LAND
: its a pipe dream
: and openfirmware, while technically correct, is CRAP
: FUCKING CRAP
: zzzz
: it is
: its all crap
: like IOS is better for a boot loader
: but crapple is the crap of the crap
: cream of the crap
: creamy pussy
: nasty dirty
: creaming crud

I have included much information to utterly refute your LIES.

Its not cheaper. Maybe cheap as in cheap shit, but not bang for the buck ZEALOT. ZEALOT.

No ECC mem. No SCSI. No RAID. NOT A SERVER, YOU TOOL.

Zealot. You are a lying Zealot. I have a G3 no one wanted. I got OS 10.2 running. It sucks ass, and G3 are slower than pig-shit. The OS is not Unix power user friendly. Its packaging system is HORRIBLE. You don't know what you are talking about - AT ALL.

http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/
Go here to see it G4-1000, spec INT of 306 (SPEC-CPU2000), P3-1000 spec INT of 309. Hhahaha.

Dual G4 1000 Macs are getting DESTROYED by a SINGLE P4 in benchmarks. Zealots, deny this one. http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs said this week that his company would consider moving to Intel chips, but that he would wait until at least 2003 because the transition to Mac OS X was more important. But with the speed of Power PC hardware increasingly falling behind Intel's chips--The Pentium 4 will hit 3 GHz this year--Apple would be wise to do a bit of research. I recommend AMD's upcoming 64-bit Opteron, which will give Apple a technological leg up on Windows and, perhaps, offer them Windows compatibility through the Opteron's full compatibility with 32-bit x86 code. Come on, Apple: Do the right thing." Read the blurb on WinInformant. Read more for a short commentary.

"The dual Athlon is still the fastest PC we've tested, but the single Intel P4 2.53 GHz machine runs a close second, and even beats the dual Athlon on some of the tests. And, as expected, the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up with these two PCs. Even though the P4 machine has only a single processor, it was easy for it to leave the dual-processor Mac far behind." Read the benchmarks at DigitalVideoEditing.

A quick comparison, when using the better compilers for the x86 CPUs:

Integer Results:
Athlon 1666 (2000+) : 697
P4 2200 : 790
G4 1000 : 306
PIII 667 : 310

Floating Point Results:
Athlon 1666 : 596
P4 2200 : 779
G4 1000: 187
PIII 667 : 222

For the people who argue that Altivec was not enabled. This is true, but it is also unfair.

The compiler they used, gcc 2.95.2, doesn't know how to use MMX or SSE either, and barely knows how to use the PPro floating-point instructions FCOMI and FCMOVcc.

Fuck those Mongoloid retards. Never in my life have I seen a royal fuckup as them not being able to whip MSFT ass with OS X. But they had to fuck-face try to be a hardware vendor in a world of cheap chink knockoffs (where the hardware is commoditized to the point where there is little quality variance) where even Compaq died and shriveled up. Fucking idiots.

"Will Microsoft dump Mac support? Two firms slag off each other By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 12:22 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4485

"Apple profits halve in Q2 Jobs predicts flatness ahead By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

" "bait and switch." Apple: Apple to Unveil .Mac Today Posted by pudge on Wednesday July 17, @04:31AM Steve Mason writes "Apple has put up a .Mac FAQ up here proving that .Mac will indeed be introduced at Mac World New York. .Mac will cost $100 a year as previous rumors had reported." Yes, this means that if you don't pay Apple, your mac.com URL and email address will stop working. Some have suggested that the "switch" in Apple's new ad campaign stands for the unfortunate part of a "bait and switch." Someone should mirror that URL, it might be taken down any second now.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/1 7/ 1134213&mode=nested&tid=107

Zealots. He used the word "magic" and excused unethical business practice, ignore their plunging profits and growing customer dissatisfaction, their complete loss of the educations market only to have their stake in things being upheld by horn-rimmed-glass wearing elitist "artists" and "musicians" who have to make it look like if you create art or music on anything but a Mac its amateurish and unprofessional because they don't know what the fuck they are doing and are being shown up by talented/poor people with PCs.

I have *never* met a Mac user that has taught me one things about computing. Ever.

Steve Jobs is egotistical, and he chose to not take on XP head to head with OS X. Now OS X is relegated to a niche processor, once Adobe and MSFT pull the plug (notice Adobe took considerable time to get OS X versions of their stuff out the door with CALL-HOME on all their apps for the Mac) there wont be much to speak of in terms of software. If OS X was for x86, there would be sex appeal, the would make more money and the x86 would finally get an Open Firmware and a vendor with a deep respect for building the right things (an the wrong video chipsets) on the motherboards.

The Apple ][ was it for them. After that, the TRASH-80 seems like a holy crusade.

I have a G3 here beside me, and I can't upgrade the CPU officially, they wont give a 4.X firmware for it, so much for OPEN-firmware, its slow as fucking SHIT with this horribly slow clock and HALF SPEED cache, and there is no SCSI. It's a PC with a slow CPU.

I never had any intention of running MacOSX server on it. Instead I wanted to run NetBSD.

The Xserve uses Motorola 7455 processor with 2MB of L3 cache and PC2100 RAM. Unfortunately, even though this is a "server" class machine, Apple skimped and did not allow you to use ECC memory. For a datacenter machine, this seems remarkably short sighted.

While the machine is quick, it still lags behind the high-end P4 and Athlon's when it comes to doing NetBSD builds. It is slightly slower the same speed as 1.4GHz Athlon.

If you need a lot of powerpc computing in a small form factor, the Xserve is a nice box but x86 still has it beat when it comes to price/performance.

One last thing, the Xserve is exceptionally loud. Granted it is a 1U box but it is louder than other 1U I've ever heard.

After having a (single CPU) Xserve to play for the past week, I thought I'd try to interject some of my experience with it.
I have to say that the Xserve is not the first dual processor RISC 1U machine. The Alpha powered CS20 precedes by well over a year (which can have two 833MHz 21264 (EV67) cpus).

Note: The Dell 1650 and 2650 are both cheaper, the 2650 has SMT, and ECC (and nice linux
ecc support as well, it logs ECC errors in syslog). They also include onboard RAID(option
via 7899 asic) and a U160 AIC-7899 by default. And you can buy retail CPUs and retail
memory for Dells often at half the price without voiding the warranty.

Apple charges $500 per 120GB EIDE drive. HAHAHAHA.

Apple is right about one thing, that Alpha has existed for some time, but have you ever
tried actually buying an Alpha? Its hard, I know an engineer who works for
DEC->/Compaq->/HP, and I was dying to buy one, and he couldnt find anyone to call me
about getting one.

Apple's New 1U servers: Sorry. Doesn't fit well in a market where the Dell 1550/1650 and
2550 and 2650 exist. Sorry. THEY DON'T PUBLISH SPEC numbers. Apple is a dying breed, I
just recently tried to revive my interest in them only to be disappointed. The Motorola
PPC architecture is embarrassingly slow, and they always are quick to point out the
near-useless Altivec and some obscure filter in Photoshop, but its not true. I have a Mac,
several PCs and a SPARC at *home*, so trust me people, this box is a bore. And OS X and
Open ClosedROM make putting regular memory, disks and CPU upgrades NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE, they
try to block it so you have to buy the same part from them 3x the cost. And the Dell 530
Dual P4-Xeon with SMT buries the fastest Mac by almost a factor of two.
OS X is no great shakes as of yet because even though most of the porting off of Classic
has been done, there are annoying remnants of classic everywhere, including a gamut of
Apple utilities. These are notoriously the worst Administrator-unfriendly boxes in the
industry, and I have used a few boxen in my time. OS X's Darwin kernel will be sorely
eclipsed by Linux 2.6, and 2.4.X is already superior in all the ways I can tell (This isnt
to say BSD it bad, but I dont think this OS demands a PREMIUM). I tried YellowDog, Madrake
and Debian on PPC as well, and they ran (even with aggressive G3 optimizations) rather
poorly - but interestingly far faster than native OS X.
This is a dying gasp of air from a dead Unix vendor, who has had to turn themselves into a
Microsoft VAR (most popular Mac Application: Microsoft Office X).
If you have an insatiable fetish for PPC, DON'T. Wait for Hammer. Remind yourself about
SMT, and 2.8GHz clock speeds before you go pay for obsolete/deprecated silicon. And the
term RISC? Pathetic.
I happily resell our product on a 1650 and 2650. We "configured" a Mac box
because we were genuinely curious. We laughed at the final price and moved on.
This isn't a troll, or a flame - its reality. What this box does can be done with a 1650,
with redundant power supplies, with SCSI and hardware raid build ON BOARD, dual gigabit
NICs onboard, dual 1400 MHZ/512cache Tualatin (with SPEC numbers to gauge the performance
by) (2650 gets high clock Xeons), two 64bit/66Mhz slots, onboard video, console
redirection, USB, etc. And for half the price. And you can use retail Intel CPUs,(cheap),
retail hard drives (if you don't want to buy the Dell ones at a modest premium), and
retail Crucial.com memory (the same memory Dell uses for Half the price). All in all, you
get a box, for half the price, with twice the features and performance. And this is coming
from a person who doesn't even LIKE Dell. (I feel I can always build better more reliable
systems than most of the PC vendors.)
BBBBBBZT. Apple, you lost, you lost, you will always be niche because OS X isn't where it
needs to be - on an X86.

TO give a better link for you, since you will have trouble finding this on your own, I'll put you right where you need to be to see Motorola PPC chips are, well, so horrible they wont publish industry standard Specmarks.
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000. ht ml

Sorry. Apple. Steve Jobs keeps them in business but his ego is trash. I know people who work there, personally . You pay for his ego.

Ok. Publish your findings. No, I didnt think so. So its as conjective as my assertations,
which are based on my whim in addition to evideince (or lacktherof), and the reading of
the CPU Report, EE Times, etc. I'm into this industry, and unless you are a zealot, you
would know PPC is IBM now. Motorola is in the dirt.

Bzzt. I like NeXT. Ahead of its time, over priced. Darwin is useless, I have 1.4.1, its
crap. OS X is nice looking, but it is *very* easy to "piss" the system off, its
package manager is so bad compared to RPM I wont even start, and it is, as as what I
consider a *nix to be, wholly inadequate and incomplete. Next.

About being content free, thats a snarky, trollish accusation. Now why dont you use Purify
on yourself and remove all the said cruft and actually say something in Apple's defense
besides naming Mach 3.0+ (like if it was 5.0+ would it make a shit bit of difference.) I
hate zealotry.

And about computing pleasure. This isnt fafenugen or a driving experience, dude, its about
stuff WORKING, well, for the lowest cost with the cheapest parts. There is no sex appeal
in server administration.

Funny, everytime I have gone to a Mac shop they have, for as long as I can ever remember,
always, ALWAYS had NT based servers. Unilaterally.

And I saw a few Mac shops in my time in New York.

You know what, not that I like NT, but they worked more reliably (generally Compaq
servers) than the Macs did. (Mostly these days non parity memory and no SCSI anymore, its

Funny. When I run a linux or *nix or NT based server I dont have a .DOC reader installed.
Ever. Maybe a PDF reader if I can't figure something out using google, a few nesgroups and
other better-than-manuals-and-man-page sources.

For those wondering why .DOC is still a problem, I have noticed that documents shared even
between Office X, XP and 2002 are very inconsistent. Its MSFT playing the upgrade me to
fix problems game. For complicated layout and manuals, use Framaker or a LaTeX backended
application or something realistic.

As far as OS X being "young", I think its probably the oldest feeling Unix there
is. Old kernel, old Unix specification (I happen to like what I find in a SYS V style /etc) and old binaries included without gcc in the default install. Its only young in that
Apple does not know very well how to serve people who use unix.

I gave OS X a fair shot on a G3 with 1GB of memory. Its good. I wated to use it instead of
Microsoft crap for home use, but I wouldnt switch from Win2k after that. They also block
CPU upgrade cards, which are expensive. They try to block 3rd party memory. The included
keyboard and mouse always sucks. And they try not to partition non-apple drives with Drive
Setup, which is the WORST partitioning utility, and Apple's partition maps are screwed up
and stupid, and trying to run OS X without classic is diffcult because so many fools still
have ported thier stuff to OS X.

I'll stick to PCs for home computing, and think about other vendors for servers.

IS MICROSOFT CONTEMPLATING ditching support for Apple Macs?
That's the thrust of an article that appeared on Wininfo a day or two back, but if
Microsoft is getting out of the Mac market, it's not quite yet.

And all is not well in other respects, reports Mac Rumors, which has posted what it says
is an Apple FAQ saying people will have to pay for .mac accounts.

Microsoft has already prepared a press release to time with the Macworld Expo saying that
it has announced a Microsoft Office V.x "triple header", this being an
announcement which offers better mobility with Palm handheld for Entourage X, a way to buy
Office v.X cheaper, and some Windows compatibility with the RDC client.

The Wininfo article, however, quotes Kevin Browne, who runs the Mac Business Unit at
Microsoft as saying Apple hasn't made much of an effort to promote Mac OSX, even though
there are opportunities.

He is quoted as saying that "if things don't dramatically turn round", it might
be Goodnight Mr Chips for Steve Jobs firm.

But the same article says that Apple blames Microsoft for sales problems with Office
v.X.

Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates have traditionally had a somewhat strained relationship.
Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end between the two companies?

Wininfo.

Mac Rumors is providing a blow-by-blow account of what's happening at MacExpo on the site
link above - it seems Apple may well announce support for Nforce 2, too.

On the Nvidia site, here, you'll see that Digital Vibrance Control is "currently
unavailable on Mac systems", which is more than just a hint, we guess.

*JOBS KICKS off MacWorld Expo at the Javitz Center at 09:00 Eastern time. There will be a
live Webcast using Quicktime, natch, here.

This is a good start (the buying public is sending a message to Apple, how do the intend
to GROW thier market share????????)

Apple profits halve in Q2

Jobs preducts flatness ahead

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05

APPLE MADE A NET profit of $32 million for its third quarter, almost half the profit it
made in the same period last year, and turnover fell three per cent to $1.43 billion
compared to the quarter in 2001.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum= 60 839
TITLE Firmware Update: Firmware Updates 4.1.7 and Later May Disable Out-of-Spec Third-Party RAM Article ID: Created: Modified: 60839 4/12/01 9/28/01

Read up. Apple is trying to make it harder and harder to use "out of spec" hahahaha memory. Luckily www.crucial.com always works. But imagine, a firmware update that DISABLES YOUR MEMORY.

Apple tried to block G3 owners from upgrading to G4. Nice guys.
PowerForce G4 ZIF

The PowerForce G4 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) is the only G4 CPU upgrade you will want to upgrade your "Beige" Power Mac G3, "G3 All-in-One" educational model, Blue and White G3's and the Yikes Motherboard Graphite G4's. The PowerForce G4 ZIF is one of the highest performance CPU products when used with "AltiVec enhanced" software. Utilizing the second generation PowerPC 7410 processor ("G4") the PowerForce G4 includes a full 1 megabyte of backside cache running at up to 220MHz.

G4 ZIF Upgrade vs. 800MHz G4 Apple: PowerForce ZIF G4 550/220/1MB Apple G4 733 Price $289 $1599

The Bottom Line: If you already have quite a bit invested in your Power Mac G3, it just makes sense to upgrade the processor rather than opting for the new G4 systems from Apple. Apple has finally eliminated all of the legacy ports with the removal of the ADB port on the new G4 systems, not to mention the removal of the serial ports, and SCSI on the Blue and White G3 systems. So the choice is clear. PowerLogix saves you hundreds of dollars over the cost of buying a new system!

PowerLogix was the first to release a solution for the G4 ROM block for Blue and White G3s.

Bruising by Apple
Roland Miller III

One notable fact concerning Apple's customer base is that it has always tested very highly in the category of brand loyalty. "Once a Mac user, always a Mac user." Apple has depended on this customer loyalty to get it through some rough times. It could always count on a portion of the market to continue to buy Apple products and continue to upgrade with Apple products. Despite (or perhaps due to) this loyalty, Apple has subjected its customers to some decidedly anti-customer abuses.

The latest example of Apple bruising its customers is a doozy. Due to shortages of the higher speed G4 processors, Apple speed reduced its entire line by 50 MHz and kept the prices the same. On top of that, Apple unilaterally cancelled all outstanding G4 orders with instructions that customers should reorder their systems. This has the net effect of increasing everyone's cost for the same system.

Needless to say, this action produced a massive and immediate customer backlash. Based on what I have seen on the net, this uproar lasted a few hours before Apple backed down and started to rejoin reality. After about a day of total confusion and rampant rumors followed by a week of small clarifications, Apple made right and reinstated all G4 orders except the high end 500 MHz model. Those customers were offered the choice of purchasing the "new" 450 MHz model at the original 450 MHz price, which is what should have been done in the first place.

While it is possible for me to see some corporate logic behind the original decision, never the less, this bright idea should not have left the meeting room where it was hatched. It doesn't take an MBA (obviously) to predict the firestorm that was touched off when this decision was implemented. The only positive thing I can see in this fiasco was the speed at which corrective steps were implemented. The corporation responded to its customer's will and proved somewhat nimble in the process.

Another recent example of Apple bruising was with AppleShare IP 6.2. Apple decided to charge several hundred dollars for this upgrade (the previous being 6.1.) The only problem was that aside from a few new features, it was mainly seen as a bug-fix and compatibility upgrade for MacOS 8.6 (which itself was a free upgrade to 8.5.1.) You couldn't run ASIP 6.1 on 8.6 and you couldn't run the upgrade on 8.5. Again, the reaction was very predictable: customer outrage. Apple listened to its customers and eventually made 6.2 a free update to 6.1.

You may have also have heard about Apple purposefully preventing G3 owners from installing G4 CPU upgrades with a firmware upgrade that officially solved another problem. People were again outraged when the rumor was confirmed by all of the CPU upgrade companies. The outrage keyed on false advertising and speculation that Apple released a Trojan horse.

There were unofficial rumors from anonymous Apple employees that this firmware block will be removed with Mac OS 9. However, there has been no official word from Apple concerning this issue. In the meantime, all the CPU upgrade companies have announced that they have gotten around the block and that their respective upgrade will work fine when they ship.

While Apple has responded favorably to two of these examples, all of these misfires do take a toll. Many people simply will not tolerate this sort of behavior from a major corporation. A company simply cannot afford to make too many of these types of decisions and still remain in business.

Ultimately what can be learned from these examples?

The perception of the "bottom-line" doesn't always coincide with the needs of the consumer resulting in corporate mistakes of judgment. Some of them can be bad enough to make the pages of the Laramie Daily Boomerang. I can't speculate on whether these bad decisions were based on stupidity or on over estimating the loyalty of AppleÕs customers or both. Apple has taken concrete steps in most of these cases to defuse the situation. As long as Apple continues to admit that it is wrong and make things right immediately, I will still tolerate being one of its customers.

Until next time. . .

It wasn't meant to be a troll. And thank you for your honesty.

I gave OS X a fair shake. I have many machines at home and with Gnucleus I was able to get
just about every Mac app compiled native for OS X in existence. (Thank god I wont be
keeping any of them or buying any of them - try before you buy, people)

I have to say that the total lack of incumbent middleware is horrible with OS X. Its
barely an OS out of the box. I hate having to boot from a CD to manage anything, and its
multiboot handling is inferior. The Norton set of tools is pathetically weak for the
money. Office X is admittedly excellent. But that's it. IE was mentioned not too long ago
as rendering incorrectly and having a huge security flaw that is fixed in 5.2.1, but the
response from MSFT took much longer than they do for x86.

If OS X was ported to x86 (looks like it has) I would buy it. Period. Forget buying a PPC
ripp off machine though.

I noticed on the OS X cd there is i386 directories littering the place and Darwin
(hahahah) works on like one computer with an intel chip deep in the belly of Apple, but
they are not trying to make Darwin/X86 more appealing than ANY ANY of the other BSDs, they
all destroy Darwin in usability, even when you get Darwin from
http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/.

I came, I saw, I mastered it, I left. Its BORING.

And as far as IPFW. IPF for OpenBSD is out. and there are no decent APP-firewalls for OS X
(Firewalk sucks), Brickhouse is a joke of a GUI.

I am thinking Kerio Winroute/Personal Firewall as a base comparison. The fact nothing
analogous exists in Mac OS X land make this platform more unusable. Also, if Apple like
fit and finish on Unix, why dont they make the more complicated things useable through
GUI (like Brickhouse did for IPF). Noo, the only people Apple caters to is those who die
their hair purple and sucks on pacifier and laugh at baby rattles while they are e-tarded
from their last bout with Xtasy after the cool rave for mac zealots.

: We can forget about this because its a pipe dream and it wont ever happen and it wont ever happen because its a pipe dream.

I think its clear its a pipe dream, we can forget about it because its a pipedreamery factory pumping out pipes and dreams.

: PIPE DREAM
: openfirmware is worst
its like you get a command line
: anything apple is worse
: its poop
: of something worse than unuseable
: you can run like 10 OSes on a pc
: well even suns have openfirmware
: its not like clear why its good
: crapple is like 3 oses, tops
: alpha SRM is good
: linBIOS (pipe Dream) would be good
: repairing remote filesystems over the network isnt gay
: like a real SRM would let you do
: but not going to happen in PC LAND
: its a pipe dream
: and openfirmware, while technically correct, is CRAP
: FUCKING CRAP
: zzzz
: it is
: its all crap
: like IOS is better for a boot loader
: but crapple is the crap of the crap
: cream of the crap
: creamy pussy
: nasty dirty
: creaming crud

These arent even fit for SCHOOLS, let alone be worthy of being called WORKSTATIONS LOL. Lying zealot.
Zealot. You are a lying Zealot. I have a G3 no one wanted. I got OS 10.2 running. It sucks ass, and G3 are slower than pig-shit. The OS is not Unix power user friendly. Its packaging system is HORRIBLE. You don't know what you are talking about - AT ALL.

http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/
Go here to see it G4-1000, spec INT of 306 (SPEC-CPU2000), P3-1000 spec INT of 309. Hhahaha.

Dual G4 1000 Macs are getting DESTROYED by a SINGLE P4 in benchmarks. Zealots, deny this one. http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs said this week that his company would consider moving to Intel chips, but that he would wait until at least 2003 because the transition to Mac OS X was more important. But with the speed of Power PC hardware increasingly falling behind Intel's chips--The Pentium 4 will hit 3 GHz this year--Apple would be wise to do a bit of research. I recommend AMD's upcoming 64-bit Opteron, which will give Apple a technological leg up on Windows and, perhaps, offer them Windows compatibility through the Opteron's full compatibility with 32-bit x86 code. Come on, Apple: Do the right thing." Read the blurb on WinInformant. Read more for a short commentary.

"The dual Athlon is still the fastest PC we've tested, but the single Intel P4 2.53 GHz machine runs a close second, and even beats the dual Athlon on some of the tests. And, as expected, the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up with these two PCs. Even though the P4 machine has only a single processor, it was easy for it to leave the dual-processor Mac far behind." Read the benchmarks at DigitalVideoEditing.

A quick comparison, when using the better compilers for the x86 CPUs:

Integer Results:
Athlon 1666 (2000+) : 697
P4 2200 : 790
G4 1000 : 306
PIII 667 : 310

Floating Point Results:
Athlon 1666 : 596
P4 2200 : 779
G4 1000: 187
PIII 667 : 222

For the people who argue that Altivec was not enabled. This is true, but it is also unfair.

The compiler they used, gcc 2.95.2, doesn't know how to use MMX or SSE either, and barely knows how to use the PPro floating-point instructions FCOMI and FCMOVcc.

Fuck those Mongoloid retards. Never in my life have I seen a royal fuckup as them not being able to whip MSFT ass with OS X. But they had to fuck-face try to be a hardware vendor in a world of cheap chink knockoffs (where the hardware is commoditized to the point where there is little quality variance) where even Compaq died and shriveled up. Fucking idiots.

"Will Microsoft dump Mac support? Two firms slag off each other By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 12:22 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4485

"Apple profits halve in Q2 Jobs predicts flatness ahead By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

" "bait and switch." Apple: Apple to Unveil .Mac Today Posted by pudge on Wednesday July 17, @04:31AM Steve Mason writes "Apple has put up a .Mac FAQ up here proving that .Mac will indeed be introduced at Mac World New York. .Mac will cost $100 a year as previous rumors had reported." Yes, this means that if you don't pay Apple, your mac.com URL and email address will stop working. Some have suggested that the "switch" in Apple's new ad campaign stands for the unfortunate part of a "bait and switch." Someone should mirror that URL, it might be taken down any second now.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/1 7/ 1134213&mode=nested&tid=107

Zealots. He used the word "magic" and excused unethical business practice, ignore their plunging profits and growing customer dissatisfaction, their complete loss of the educations market only to have their stake in things being upheld by horn-rimmed-glass wearing elitist "artists" and "musicians" who have to make it look like if you create art or music on anything but a Mac its amateurish and unprofessional because they don't know what the fuck they are doing and are being shown up by talented/poor people with PCs.

I have *never* met a Mac user that has taught me one things about computing. Ever.

Steve Jobs is egotistical, and he chose to not take on XP head to head with OS X. Now OS X is relegated to a niche processor, once Adobe and MSFT pull the plug (notice Adobe took considerable time to get OS X versions of their stuff out the door with CALL-HOME on all their apps for the Mac) there wont be much to speak of in terms of software. If OS X was for x86, there would be sex appeal, the would make more money and the x86 would finally get an Open Firmware and a vendor with a deep respect for building the right things (an the wrong video chipsets) on the motherboards.

The Apple ][ was it for them. After that, the TRASH-80 seems like a holy crusade.

I have a G3 here beside me, and I can't upgrade the CPU officially, they wont give a 4.X firmware for it, so much for OPEN-firmware, its slow as fucking SHIT with this horribly slow clock and HALF SPEED cache, and there is no SCSI. It's a PC with a slow CPU.

I never had any intention of running MacOSX server on it. Instead I wanted to run NetBSD.

The Xserve uses Motorola 7455 processor with 2MB of L3 cache and PC2100 RAM. Unfortunately, even though this is a "server" class machine, Apple skimped and did not allow you to use ECC memory. For a datacenter machine, this seems remarkably short sighted.

While the machine is quick, it still lags behind the high-end P4 and Athlon's when it comes to doing NetBSD builds. It is slightly slower the same speed as 1.4GHz Athlon.

If you need a lot of powerpc computing in a small form factor, the Xserve is a nice box but x86 still has it beat when it comes to price/performance.

One last thing, the Xserve is exceptionally loud. Granted it is a 1U box but it is louder than other 1U I've ever heard.

After having a (single CPU) Xserve to play for the past week, I thought I'd try to interject some of my experience with it.
I have to say that the Xserve is not the first dual processor RISC 1U machine. The Alpha powered CS20 precedes by well over a year (which can have two 833MHz 21264 (EV67) cpus).

Note: The Dell 1650 and 2650 are both cheaper, the 2650 has SMT, and ECC (and nice linux
ecc support as well, it logs ECC errors in syslog). They also include onboard RAID(option
via 7899 asic) and a U160 AIC-7899 by default. And you can buy retail CPUs and retail
memory for Dells often at half the price without voiding the warranty.

Apple charges $500 per 120GB EIDE drive. HAHAHAHA.

Apple is right about one thing, that Alpha has existed for some time, but have you ever
tried actually buying an Alpha? Its hard, I know an engineer who works for
DEC->/Compaq->/HP, and I was dying to buy one, and he couldnt find anyone to call me
about getting one.

Apple's New 1U servers: Sorry. Doesn't fit well in a market where the Dell 1550/1650 and
2550 and 2650 exist. Sorry. THEY DON'T PUBLISH SPEC numbers. Apple is a dying breed, I
just recently tried to revive my interest in them only to be disappointed. The Motorola
PPC architecture is embarrassingly slow, and they always are quick to point out the
near-useless Altivec and some obscure filter in Photoshop, but its not true. I have a Mac,
several PCs and a SPARC at *home*, so trust me people, this box is a bore. And OS X and
Open ClosedROM make putting regular memory, disks and CPU upgrades NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE, they
try to block it so you have to buy the same part from them 3x the cost. And the Dell 530
Dual P4-Xeon with SMT buries the fastest Mac by almost a factor of two.
OS X is no great shakes as of yet because even though most of the porting off of Classic
has been done, there are annoying remnants of classic everywhere, including a gamut of
Apple utilities. These are notoriously the worst Administrator-unfriendly boxes in the
industry, and I have used a few boxen in my time. OS X's Darwin kernel will be sorely
eclipsed by Linux 2.6, and 2.4.X is already superior in all the ways I can tell (This isnt
to say BSD it bad, but I dont think this OS demands a PREMIUM). I tried YellowDog, Madrake
and Debian on PPC as well, and they ran (even with aggressive G3 optimizations) rather
poorly - but interestingly far faster than native OS X.
This is a dying gasp of air from a dead Unix vendor, who has had to turn themselves into a
Microsoft VAR (most popular Mac Application: Microsoft Office X).
If you have an insatiable fetish for PPC, DON'T. Wait for Hammer. Remind yourself about
SMT, and 2.8GHz clock speeds before you go pay for obsolete/deprecated silicon. And the
term RISC? Pathetic.
I happily resell our product on a 1650 and 2650. We "configured" a Mac box
because we were genuinely curious. We laughed at the final price and moved on.
This isn't a troll, or a flame - its reality. What this box does can be done with a 1650,
with redundant power supplies, with SCSI and hardware raid build ON BOARD, dual gigabit
NICs onboard, dual 1400 MHZ/512cache Tualatin (with SPEC numbers to gauge the performance
by) (2650 gets high clock Xeons), two 64bit/66Mhz slots, onboard video, console
redirection, USB, etc. And for half the price. And you can use retail Intel CPUs,(cheap),
retail hard drives (if you don't want to buy the Dell ones at a modest premium), and
retail Crucial.com memory (the same memory Dell uses for Half the price). All in all, you
get a box, for half the price, with twice the features and performance. And this is coming
from a person who doesn't even LIKE Dell. (I feel I can always build better more reliable
systems than most of the PC vendors.)
BBBBBBZT. Apple, you lost, you lost, you will always be niche because OS X isn't where it
needs to be - on an X86.

TO give a better link for you, since you will have trouble finding this on your own, I'll put you right where you need to be to see Motorola PPC chips are, well, so horrible they wont publish industry standard Specmarks.
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000. ht ml

Sorry. Apple. Steve Jobs keeps them in business but his ego is trash. I know people who work there, personally . You pay for his ego.

Ok. Publish your findings. No, I didnt think so. So its as conjective as my assertations,
which are based on my whim in addition to evideince (or lacktherof), and the reading of
the CPU Report, EE Times, etc. I'm into this industry, and unless you are a zealot, you
would know PPC is IBM now. Motorola is in the dirt.

Bzzt. I like NeXT. Ahead of its time, over priced. Darwin is useless, I have 1.4.1, its
crap. OS X is nice looking, but it is *very* easy to "piss" the system off, its
package manager is so bad compared to RPM I wont even start, and it is, as as what I
consider a *nix to be, wholly inadequate and incomplete. Next.

About being content free, thats a snarky, trollish accusation. Now why dont you use Purify
on yourself and remove all the said cruft and actually say something in Apple's defense
besides naming Mach 3.0+ (like if it was 5.0+ would it make a shit bit of difference.) I
hate zealotry.

And about computing pleasure. This isnt fafenugen or a driving experience, dude, its about
stuff WORKING, well, for the lowest cost with the cheapest parts. There is no sex appeal
in server administration.

Funny, everytime I have gone to a Mac shop they have, for as long as I can ever remember,
always, ALWAYS had NT based servers. Unilaterally.

And I saw a few Mac shops in my time in New York.

You know what, not that I like NT, but they worked more reliably (generally Compaq
servers) than the Macs did. (Mostly these days non parity memory and no SCSI anymore, its

Funny. When I run a linux or *nix or NT based server I dont have a .DOC reader installed.
Ever. Maybe a PDF reader if I can't figure something out using google, a few nesgroups and
other better-than-manuals-and-man-page sources.

For those wondering why .DOC is still a problem, I have noticed that documents shared even
between Office X, XP and 2002 are very inconsistent. Its MSFT playing the upgrade me to
fix problems game. For complicated layout and manuals, use Framaker or a LaTeX backended
application or something realistic.

As far as OS X being "young", I think its probably the oldest feeling Unix there
is. Old kernel, old Unix specification (I happen to like what I find in a SYS V style /etc) and old binaries included without gcc in the default install. Its only young in that
Apple does not know very well how to serve people who use unix.

I gave OS X a fair shot on a G3 with 1GB of memory. Its good. I wated to use it instead of
Microsoft crap for home use, but I wouldnt switch from Win2k after that. They also block
CPU upgrade cards, which are expensive. They try to block 3rd party memory. The included
keyboard and mouse always sucks. And they try not to partition non-apple drives with Drive
Setup, which is the WORST partitioning utility, and Apple's partition maps are screwed up
and stupid, and trying to run OS X without classic is diffcult because so many fools still
have ported thier stuff to OS X.

I'll stick to PCs for home computing, and think about other vendors for servers.

IS MICROSOFT CONTEMPLATING ditching support for Apple Macs?
That's the thrust of an article that appeared on Wininfo a day or two back, but if
Microsoft is getting out of the Mac market, it's not quite yet.

And all is not well in other respects, reports Mac Rumors, which has posted what it says
is an Apple FAQ saying people will have to pay for .mac accounts.

Microsoft has already prepared a press release to time with the Macworld Expo saying that
it has announced a Microsoft Office V.x "triple header", this being an
announcement which offers better mobility with Palm handheld for Entourage X, a way to buy
Office v.X cheaper, and some Windows compatibility with the RDC client.

The Wininfo article, however, quotes Kevin Browne, who runs the Mac Business Unit at
Microsoft as saying Apple hasn't made much of an effort to promote Mac OSX, even though
there are opportunities.

He is quoted as saying that "if things don't dramatically turn round", it might
be Goodnight Mr Chips for Steve Jobs firm.

But the same article says that Apple blames Microsoft for sales problems with Office
v.X.

Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates have traditionally had a somewhat strained relationship.
Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end between the two companies?

Wininfo.

Mac Rumors is providing a blow-by-blow account of what's happening at MacExpo on the site
link above - it seems Apple may well announce support for Nforce 2, too.

On the Nvidia site, here, you'll see that Digital Vibrance Control is "currently
unavailable on Mac systems", which is more than just a hint, we guess.

*JOBS KICKS off MacWorld Expo at the Javitz Center at 09:00 Eastern time. There will be a
live Webcast using Quicktime, natch, here.

This is a good start (the buying public is sending a message to Apple, how do the intend
to GROW thier market share????????)

Apple profits halve in Q2

Jobs preducts flatness ahead

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05

APPLE MADE A NET profit of $32 million for its third quarter, almost half the profit it
made in the same period last year, and turnover fell three per cent to $1.43 billion
compared to the quarter in 2001.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum= 60 839
TITLE Firmware Update: Firmware Updates 4.1.7 and Later May Disable Out-of-Spec Third-Party RAM Article ID: Created: Modified: 60839 4/12/01 9/28/01

Read up. Apple is trying to make it harder and harder to use "out of spec" hahahaha memory. Luckily www.crucial.com always works. But imagine, a firmware update that DISABLES YOUR MEMORY.

Apple tried to block G3 owners from upgrading to G4. Nice guys.
PowerForce G4 ZIF

The PowerForce G4 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) is the only G4 CPU upgrade you will want to upgrade your "Beige" Power Mac G3, "G3 All-in-One" educational model, Blue and White G3's and the Yikes Motherboard Graphite G4's. The PowerForce G4 ZIF is one of the highest performance CPU products when used with "AltiVec enhanced" software. Utilizing the second generation PowerPC 7410 processor ("G4") the PowerForce G4 includes a full 1 megabyte of backside cache running at up to 220MHz.

G4 ZIF Upgrade vs. 800MHz G4 Apple: PowerForce ZIF G4 550/220/1MB Apple G4 733 Price $289 $1599

The Bottom Line: If you already have quite a bit invested in your Power Mac G3, it just makes sense to upgrade the processor rather than opting for the new G4 systems from Apple. Apple has finally eliminated all of the legacy ports with the removal of the ADB port on the new G4 systems, not to mention the removal of the serial ports, and SCSI on the Blue and White G3 systems. So the choice is clear. PowerLogix saves you hundreds of dollars over the cost of buying a new system!

PowerLogix was the first to release a solution for the G4 ROM block for Blue and White G3s.

Bruising by Apple
Roland Miller III

One notable fact concerning Apple's customer base is that it has always tested very highly in the category of brand loyalty. "Once a Mac user, always a Mac user." Apple has depended on this customer loyalty to get it through some rough times. It could always count on a portion of the market to continue to buy Apple products and continue to upgrade with Apple products. Despite (or perhaps due to) this loyalty, Apple has subjected its customers to some decidedly anti-customer abuses.

The latest example of Apple bruising its customers is a doozy. Due to shortages of the higher speed G4 processors, Apple speed reduced its entire line by 50 MHz and kept the prices the same. On top of that, Apple unilaterally cancelled all outstanding G4 orders with instructions that customers should reorder their systems. This has the net effect of increasing everyone's cost for the same system.

Needless to say, this action produced a massive and immediate customer backlash. Based on what I have seen on the net, this uproar lasted a few hours before Apple backed down and started to rejoin reality. After about a day of total confusion and rampant rumors followed by a week of small clarifications, Apple made right and reinstated all G4 orders except the high end 500 MHz model. Those customers were offered the choice of purchasing the "new" 450 MHz model at the original 450 MHz price, which is what should have been done in the first place.

While it is possible for me to see some corporate logic behind the original decision, never the less, this bright idea should not have left the meeting room where it was hatched. It doesn't take an MBA (obviously) to predict the firestorm that was touched off when this decision was implemented. The only positive thing I can see in this fiasco was the speed at which corrective steps were implemented. The corporation responded to its customer's will and proved somewhat nimble in the process.

Another recent example of Apple bruising was with AppleShare IP 6.2. Apple decided to charge several hundred dollars for this upgrade (the previous being 6.1.) The only problem was that aside from a few new features, it was mainly seen as a bug-fix and compatibility upgrade for MacOS 8.6 (which itself was a free upgrade to 8.5.1.) You couldn't run ASIP 6.1 on 8.6 and you couldn't run the upgrade on 8.5. Again, the reaction was very predictable: customer outrage. Apple listened to its customers and eventually made 6.2 a free update to 6.1.

You may have also have heard about Apple purposefully preventing G3 owners from installing G4 CPU upgrades with a firmware upgrade that officially solved another problem. People were again outraged when the rumor was confirmed by all of the CPU upgrade companies. The outrage keyed on false advertising and speculation that Apple released a Trojan horse.

There were unofficial rumors from anonymous Apple employees that this firmware block will be removed with Mac OS 9. However, there has been no official word from Apple concerning this issue. In the meantime, all the CPU upgrade companies have announced that they have gotten around the block and that their respective upgrade will work fine when they ship.

While Apple has responded favorably to two of these examples, all of these misfires do take a toll. Many people simply will not tolerate this sort of behavior from a major corporation. A company simply cannot afford to make too many of these types of decisions and still remain in business.

Ultimately what can be learned from these examples?

The perception of the "bottom-line" doesn't always coincide with the needs of the consumer resulting in corporate mistakes of judgment. Some of them can be bad enough to make the pages of the Laramie Daily Boomerang. I can't speculate on whether these bad decisions were based on stupidity or on over estimating the loyalty of AppleÕs customers or both. Apple has taken concrete steps in most of these cases to defuse the situation. As long as Apple continues to admit that it is wrong and make things right immediately, I will still tolerate being one of its customers.

Until next time. . .

It wasn't meant to be a troll. And thank you for your honesty.

I gave OS X a fair shake. I have many machines at home and with Gnucleus I was able to get
just about every Mac app compiled native for OS X in existence. (Thank god I wont be
keeping any of them or buying any of them - try before you buy, people)

I have to say that the total lack of incumbent middleware is horrible with OS X. Its
barely an OS out of the box. I hate having to boot from a CD to manage anything, and its
multiboot handling is inferior. The Norton set of tools is pathetically weak for the
money. Office X is admittedly excellent. But that's it. IE was mentioned not too long ago
as rendering incorrectly and having a huge security flaw that is fixed in 5.2.1, but the
response from MSFT took much longer than they do for x86.

If OS X was ported to x86 (looks like it has) I would buy it. Period. Forget buying a PPC
ripp off machine though.

I noticed on the OS X cd there is i386 directories littering the place and Darwin
(hahahah) works on like one computer with an intel chip deep in the belly of Apple, but
they are not trying to make Darwin/X86 more appealing than ANY ANY of the other BSDs, they
all destroy Darwin in usability, even when you get Darwin from
http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/.

I came, I saw, I mastered it, I left. Its BORING.

And as far as IPFW. IPF for OpenBSD is out. and there are no decent APP-firewalls for OS X
(Firewalk sucks), Brickhouse is a joke of a GUI.

I am thinking Kerio Winroute/Personal Firewall as a base comparison. The fact nothing
analogous exists in Mac OS X land make this platform more unusable. Also, if Apple like
fit and finish on Unix, why dont they make the more complicated things useable through
GUI (like Brickhouse did for IPF). Noo, the only people Apple caters to is those who die
their hair purple and sucks on pacifier and laugh at baby rattles while they are e-tarded
from their last bout with Xtasy after the cool rave for mac zealots.

: We can forget about this because its a pipe dream and it wont ever happen and it wont ever happen because its a pipe dream.

I think its clear its a pipe dream, we can forget about it because its a pipedreamery factory pumping out pipes and dreams.

: PIPE DREAM
: openfirmware is worst
its like you get a command line
: anything apple is worse
: its poop
: of something worse than unuseable
: you can run like 10 OSes on a pc
: well even suns have openfirmware
: its not like clear why its good
: crapple is like 3 oses, tops
: alpha SRM is good
: linBIOS (pipe Dream) would be good
: repairing remote filesystems over the network isnt gay
: like a real SRM would let you do
: but not going to happen in PC LAND
: its a pipe dream
: and openfirmware, while technically correct, is CRAP
: FUCKING CRAP
: zzzz
: it is
: its all crap
: like IOS is better for a boot loader
: but crapple is the crap of the crap
: cream of the crap
: creamy pussy
: nasty dirty
: creaming crud