Slashdot Mirror

Ct (german magazine), in an older article from May has proven with simple but effective tools that all existing biometry systems can be fooled ! Here is the article in German and here a google translation. I would not trust airports using that procedure. A human identifying you is always much safer...

Perhaps that's because it may not be a myth. The fact that Apple has never submitted SPEC benchmarks is also disturbing. I think Apple is significantly behind in terms of performance and they know it. The question is whether they are going to fix it by moving to IBM or Pentium.

I haven't seen the article you are refering to, but here is a link to english version of c't SPEC evaluation of 1Ghz G4 system against 1Ghz P3.

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2002q3/

1. AMD Athlon (TM) XP 2600+ (813/839)
2. Intel D850EMV2 motherboard (2.8 GHz, Pentium 4 processor) 976 /984

Recently, one of the best German computing magazines performed an extensive public test of various audio compression codecs, judging Ogg Vorbis as the clear winner. Slashdot article here.

While certainly not a flawless study, it seems a lot more legitimate than what you cite.

Recently, one of the best German computing magazines performed an extensive public test of various audio compression codecs, judging Ogg Vorbis as the clear winner. Slashdot article here.

While certainly not a flawless study, it seems a lot more legitimate than what you cite.

The guys and girls of the german c't magazine combined toms rescue boot disk with F-Prot for Linux and pressed it onto a CDROM shipped with the issue 13/2002. You can order this issue for 3 EUR + shipping (1 EUR is round about 1 US $).

If you can get internet access with that CDROM, you can even update the scanner and the data files. (And as a nice bonus, you get 600 MBytes Freeware and Shareware.)

Tux2000

The guys and girls of the german c't magazine combined toms rescue boot disk with F-Prot for Linux and pressed it onto a CDROM shipped with the issue 13/2002. You can order this issue for 3 EUR + shipping (1 EUR is round about 1 US $).

If you can get internet access with that CDROM, you can even update the scanner and the data files. (And as a nice bonus, you get 600 MBytes Freeware and Shareware.)

Tux2000

> If Nokia made WAN gear, I'm sure they wouldn't be quite as vocal about it...

...Or like their *friends* at Ericsson: Combining the two?
(This more informative article is unformtunatiely in that awful language.)

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.

The job market in general is not doing very well these days. A year ago the job section in the most polpular IT magazine CT was almost as large as the rest of the magazine. In the issue from about three month ago there has not been a single job add! I've read this magazine for about ten years now and couldn't remember that ever to happen before. In the last couple of issues the job adds are slowly coming back. But it's still not more than a trickle.

On the other hand you may have more luck trying to work as freelancer. You can find companies that are looking for freelancers at sites like this.

One thing to be aware of is that it is about as hard for a US national to get a work visa in Germany as the other way around. You may want to contact the German embassy beforhand and learn about the options.

Hope this helps and good luck!

P.S.: My nick stems from an old German movie called "Quax, the Crash Pilot"

It's called Pentium III serial number, a permanent, unique, 96-bit serial number. This number can identify your machine not only to vendors, but also to remote Web hosts.

Intel initally insisted that since all models where shipped with this functionality disabled, there was no privacy threat. In fact, Intel contended that only users could reactivate it, and therefore only users who wanted to be tracked would be exposed.

This was untrue.

This time, howover, Intel is not alone.... :(

A babelfish English transtaltion can be found here.

Why use the fish when c't provides its own translation?

Here the original article in English

Keep it simple baby. =)

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/data/anw-09 .09.02-002/

Just thought it interesting that everyone is posting babelfish / translating service translations when there is an English version available from the site.

• On bel-red yes, "half a mile down" no. The Scientology place might be half a mile from the hotel where MS put me up, but all the land between the hotel and the clams is MS campus if I recall correctly.
• It's not a conspiracy theory; for that, you'll have to ask the German government. I do, however, assert that perky cultish enthusiasm is a trait in common among Hare Krishnas, clams, evangelical Christians, PIRG members, and young Microsofties. (The hardcore free software advocates I know are sarcastic, not perky.)

Have there been any REAL double-blind tests as well as equipment tests of quality comparisons between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis yet? They never seem to get done.

Heise was just doing this (German) at the moment (ended August 29th). Public double-blind test.

Featuring:

• MP3 (of course)
• MPEG4-AAC
• MP3Pro
• Ogg Vorbis
• Windows Media Audio
• RealAudio

Watch out for results, which are being published (according to the web page) in c't magazine 19/2002 (out 2002-09-09).

Have there been any REAL double-blind tests as well as equipment tests of quality comparisons between MP3 and Ogg Vorbis yet? They never seem to get done.

Heise was just doing this (German) at the moment (ended August 29th). Public double-blind test.

Featuring:

• MP3 (of course)
• MPEG4-AAC
• MP3Pro
• Ogg Vorbis
• Windows Media Audio
• RealAudio

Watch out for results, which are being published (according to the web page) in c't magazine 19/2002 (out 2002-09-09).

Maybe it is not widely known, but Google *can* and will ban certain queries/results/terms/sites/whatever appropriate. This is probably a factor (or should I say expected result) of their rerouting change which basically determines the geographical position of a surfer and redirects to the appropriately themed google (say .de, .fr and whatever else they are running).

The probably best documented case of this is the "Operation Clambake" exclusion which was restored after heavy protests. But there were copyright issues involved so this might nut cut the cheese all the way.

What worries me more is the exponation of companies towards insane or just plainly stupid government regulations. Sometime in February a single state within Germany (which is a federal republic composed of 16 states after all) ordered their local Internet providers for exclusion of questionable material, which in this case primarily concerns fascist/white-supremacist sites like stormfront.org. Checking google.com with the query "stormfront.org" delivers a link which is clearly a site in question. Sending the same string to google.de returns nothing. Softening the query to just "stormfront" gives a couple of hits on google.com, including the nazi site. Same string for google.de gives a bunch of sites, none of which is questionable in content. Most of them are sites discussing the current situation on this case.

For the german-speaking crowd, or for those who can get their hands on a decent translator) here are some heise.de articles covering the situation: ...1... ...2... ...3...

This is a sad state of affeirs, and you won't have to go as far as China to find behaviour which should be immoral to the pluralistic and open community the planet pretends to be nowadays.

Maybe it is not widely known, but Google *can* and will ban certain queries/results/terms/sites/whatever appropriate. This is probably a factor (or should I say expected result) of their rerouting change which basically determines the geographical position of a surfer and redirects to the appropriately themed google (say .de, .fr and whatever else they are running).

The probably best documented case of this is the "Operation Clambake" exclusion which was restored after heavy protests. But there were copyright issues involved so this might nut cut the cheese all the way.

What worries me more is the exponation of companies towards insane or just plainly stupid government regulations. Sometime in February a single state within Germany (which is a federal republic composed of 16 states after all) ordered their local Internet providers for exclusion of questionable material, which in this case primarily concerns fascist/white-supremacist sites like stormfront.org. Checking google.com with the query "stormfront.org" delivers a link which is clearly a site in question. Sending the same string to google.de returns nothing. Softening the query to just "stormfront" gives a couple of hits on google.com, including the nazi site. Same string for google.de gives a bunch of sites, none of which is questionable in content. Most of them are sites discussing the current situation on this case.

For the german-speaking crowd, or for those who can get their hands on a decent translator) here are some heise.de articles covering the situation: ...1... ...2... ...3...

This is a sad state of affeirs, and you won't have to go as far as China to find behaviour which should be immoral to the pluralistic and open community the planet pretends to be nowadays.

Maybe it is not widely known, but Google *can* and will ban certain queries/results/terms/sites/whatever appropriate. This is probably a factor (or should I say expected result) of their rerouting change which basically determines the geographical position of a surfer and redirects to the appropriately themed google (say .de, .fr and whatever else they are running).

The probably best documented case of this is the "Operation Clambake" exclusion which was restored after heavy protests. But there were copyright issues involved so this might nut cut the cheese all the way.

What worries me more is the exponation of companies towards insane or just plainly stupid government regulations. Sometime in February a single state within Germany (which is a federal republic composed of 16 states after all) ordered their local Internet providers for exclusion of questionable material, which in this case primarily concerns fascist/white-supremacist sites like stormfront.org. Checking google.com with the query "stormfront.org" delivers a link which is clearly a site in question. Sending the same string to google.de returns nothing. Softening the query to just "stormfront" gives a couple of hits on google.com, including the nazi site. Same string for google.de gives a bunch of sites, none of which is questionable in content. Most of them are sites discussing the current situation on this case.

For the german-speaking crowd, or for those who can get their hands on a decent translator) here are some heise.de articles covering the situation: ...1... ...2... ...3...

This is a sad state of affeirs, and you won't have to go as far as China to find behaviour which should be immoral to the pluralistic and open community the planet pretends to be nowadays.

As you can read here the license terms have not changed at all. This is all bullshit!

The statement made by Thomson relating to Slashdot's post can be read here as well. Replying directly to the Slashdot post, Thomson makes it clear that "Thomson has never charged a per unit royalty for freely distributed software decoders."

Second of all, intel stretched their pipeline to 40+ stages, this means that the penalty for pipeline stall, branch perdiction miss, context switch, etc is *HUGE*. AMD's Athlon pipeline was a lean 7 stages.

Nicely confabulated! When making stuff up to prove a point, you might as well go for the jugular. The pipeline lengths in question are 20 and 10, not 40 and 7. Incidentally, a long pipeline has nearly nothing to do with "context switch", at least as that term is commonly used (i.e., switching from one process context to another). Any pipeline issues caused by a context switch are dwarfed a thousand times over by cache and TLB issues.

Aside: what is with the short pipeline fetishism on the part of AMD partisans? You guys realize that they had four- and fiv-stage implementations of MIPS CPUs back in the early '80's, right? Imagine how brilliantly fast a MIPS r2000 would be in 3.0GHz! Oh, wait, you can't make an r2000 run at that clock speed. Hmm. Maybe pipeline length is just one parameter in a complicated design space, and we should look on manufacturer variations as differing technical solutions. After all, that's how we treat cache design, functional unit choices, and myriad other microarchitectural parameters.

No, that sounds complicated. It must be an Intel conspiracy to corrupt our precious bodily fluids...

Why did Intel do this? They were scared because AMD beat them at their own game.

Then in a few sentences, you say:

You'll notice now that Intels best P4 is faster then AMD's best part right now...

Umm, so how was Intel "beaten at its own game"? A bit of history, for perspective.

The Pentium III is the same core that was originally sold as the Pentium Pro. That core was introduced in 1995, and Intel is still squeezing performance out of it. At the beginning of the PPro's lifetime, it was an extremely ambitious design for the physical processes then available; people called it a too-hot, too-big, too-transistor-intensive monstrosity that would never be practical. Towards the middle of its life, in the years '97 to 2000 or so, the PIII was nicely matched to the physical parameters of then-current fab technology, and Intel produced modest shrinks and speed bumps seemingly at will. Those were the salad years of the PIII. Now physical technology has moved further down the road, and the PPro core is showing its age. It's leaving performance on the table that could be scooped up with transistor-intensive techniques like trace caches, more functional units, issue width, etc.

Like almost every other design generation of every CPU, ever, the P4 has a more complicated pipeline than its predecssors. Just as in 1995, the first year showed pretty "meh" performance, with much armchair punditry claiming that it's a monstrosity. Now, about 18 months after its introduction, the P4 is scaling well. AMD, on the other hand, is struggling to wring a few more modest speed bumps out of the K7 before it limps along to the end of its design life. The AMD partisans hold out hope for the K8, generally forgetting that the K8 is a K7 with a 64-bit bag on the side.

It saddens me to type this on my Athlon, but there's a strong likelihood that AMD's years in the sun are over. Five years hence, we might be looking back at the years 1999-2001 as a lost golden age of competition in the x86 CPU space.

To remedy the situation, processors ratings need to be measured in IPC*MHZ [instructions per cycle] for both integer and floating point operations. Then it would be pretty clear to consumers what was going on.

Any simple attempt at measuring performance will end up being simplistic. The big problem with your proposal can be summed up as: which instructions? NOPs? SIMD floating point? The instructions that make up Quake III, or gcc, or my LISP stock market prediction application? What about when the instruction sets of the CPUs differ, ala SSE2? Performance characterization really is difficult; anybody who claims otherwise is trying to sell you something.

By "MHz myth", you must be referring to the fact that G4's are not performing much faster than a Pentium of similar clock speed.

Apple makes nice machines and software, but they really do need to get their act together on performance.

This technology was used in 1998 in Berlin. Short films and commercials were shown on the tunnel walls. They used sensors to measure the speed of the subway and installed computer controlled projectors to make sure the clips ran at an even speed, independent of the speed of the train.
Article from 1998 (German)
Babelfish translation

Hahahaha.... that's pretty funny; here is a link:

An integrated component of Windows 2000 is made by a Scientology company. The connection between the psycho sect and the software giant is annoying representatives of the major churches in Germany. Microsoft risks a boycott of its flagship product by churches and government agencies.

Windows 2000, the successor of Windows NT shipping in February, contains a defragmentation program called Diskeeper. The manufacturer is the company Executive Software Inc. (http://www.execsoft.com/) of the professed scientologist Craig Jensen. Founded in 1981 the enterprise offers defragmentation and data storage tools to "enhance the speed and performance of Microsoft Windows NT".

According to this article (in German) (here is an English abstract), what makes the difference between a believer and a sceptic is the dopamin level in the brain.

If you still want to learn German here is an article about it

.. sez heise. according to the article, it's supposed to be compatible to motorola's "Book E" spec for the G5 (MPC8540).

The german computer magazine ct distributes a program to test your computer's RAM. It is loaded into video memory and executed from there, so it can write into the entire RAM without crashing.

Download from here.

These are the best CINT2000-base and CFP2000-base results for various CPUs.
Athlon XP 1800MHz ("2200+") : 738 / 624
Pentium4 2533 MHz : 893 / 878
Power4 1300 MHz : 804 / 1202
Itanium2 1000 MHz : 807 / 1356
G4-1000MHz 306/187

These are the best CINT2000-base and CFP2000-base results for various CPUs.

Athlon XP 1800MHz ("2200+") : 738 / 624

Pentium4 2533 MHz : 893 / 878

Power4 1300 MHz : 804 / 1202

Itanium2 1000 MHz : 807 / 1356

G4-1000MHz 306/187

When others have looked at the G4 performance on a standard benchmark suite like SPEC (e.g., here), a 1GHz G4 is not significantly faster than a 1GHz Pentium III.

I think the PPC is a dead end for Apple. Lack of a 64bit migration path is a problem. Intel's Itanium doesn't need to fear comparison architecture-wise with PPC either. But the mainstream will go to 64bit AMD and Pentium. That's perhaps where Apple should go as well.

I know, this is not about copyrights but about trademarks, so mod me OT.

There is a VERY interesting case in Germany (yes, this is in europe): a company held a trademark of the name 'explorer' without having a product or anything. They made microsoft to pay (only) around $/Euro 90.000 and sued a couple of companies for abusing their trademark (i.e. the publisher heinz heise verlag for selling cd's with their magazines with a software called FTPExplorer on it).

The Oberlandesgericht of Cologne now canceled this trademark (translated by google) because it never was used for serious reasons but only to make money by sueing other companies.

Exactly the same thing happened (transleted by uhm... you know.) to a patent that covered the creation of human and animal embryos. After they realized what they did, the simply removed the patent after a LOUD shout out of politicians, medics and uh, guys like me.

I know, this is not about copyrights but about trademarks, so mod me OT.

There is a VERY interesting case in Germany (yes, this is in europe): a company held a trademark of the name 'explorer' without having a product or anything. They made microsoft to pay (only) around $/Euro 90.000 and sued a couple of companies for abusing their trademark (i.e. the publisher heinz heise verlag for selling cd's with their magazines with a software called FTPExplorer on it).

The Oberlandesgericht of Cologne now canceled this trademark (translated by google) because it never was used for serious reasons but only to make money by sueing other companies.

Exactly the same thing happened (transleted by uhm... you know.) to a patent that covered the creation of human and animal embryos. After they realized what they did, the simply removed the patent after a LOUD shout out of politicians, medics and uh, guys like me.

according to the article, it will be held in 2004, going all the way from LA to Las Vegas. it will be for autonomous robots, no human help allowed.
the winner will get 1 mio $, so get working.

they are quoting US media in the article, so there should be some infos in english somewhere.

Haven't had a need to try it myself, but if you need it, you can find the instructions here.

"the CPU problem lies with Motorola"

You admit there is a problem. Motorola/Apple.. who gives a damn. you are the one who is paying for obsolete hardware, fool.

Not like your G4 has a zif socket so you can upgrade the CPU when apple gets over their "problem".

Why pay good money for something you KNOW has a serious flaw.

"I bought a Ferrari but it has an old yugo engine in it... but it IS a Farrari"

The G4 1000 is available now:

Encore/ST G4
Pre-order now
Available August, 2002
SG4-1000-2M
$699.95

700 bucks for a processor that is as fast as a 1Ghz PIII @ $104.

You have bought into a scam. They stick an old CPU into a shiny box and you go oooooh, prettty shiny... looks so fast. Slow. Again, slow

I searched high and low for a solution to crufy Windows, and I believe this may be it. It's a decent set of instructions to get Windows running completely off of a CDR. It uses a ramdisk for its write purposes , and of course all changes are lost when you reboot.

Once you have the CD to your liking, you can escape the cruft of Windows.

[1] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/hos-23.07.02-0 00/

[2] http://www.borland.com/kylix/open/index.html

According to this article [heise.de] Microsoft claims to hold some rights on important functions of the new specification.

When is Apple going to come out with machines based on new processors? The benchmarks are beginning to look pretty mediocre (and that seems to agree with the real performance I see as well).

As read on the heise article (German), blasphemia is prohibited in Italy - although the authorities rarely care.

This does not sound like it is aimed at the core slashdot crowd...

Go check this interview (supplied by another /.-er). It's in German but he says he uses Mac for graphics and Linux for everything else, and won't touch Windows.
The interviewer crowns him as the Father of Open Source, but he says that although he's a big fan of it, he's just a contributer.

In an article in the German c't magazin you can find an interview with Don Knuth where he talks about a guy in california who cashes his checks on a regular basis (here is Google's attempt at it).
A far better interview can be found at Folio the magazine of the Neue Zuricher Zeitung which can also be translated by Google into something like a beginners version of english.

In an article in the German c't magazin you can find an interview with Don Knuth where he talks about a guy in california who cashes his checks on a regular basis (here is Google's attempt at it).
A far better interview can be found at Folio the magazine of the Neue Zuricher Zeitung which can also be translated by Google into something like a beginners version of english.

Apple is notably absent from SPEC's list--they never submitted results.

However, third parties have run the SPEC benchmarks. A 1GHz G4 seems to perform about as well as a 1GHz Pentium III: decent but not overwhelming. See also this Register article.

Apple should move to the G5 quickly. Or, perhaps, Apple should even switch to some 64bit Intel or AMD processor--Motorola is likely going to keep remaining behind the curve a bit.