Slashdot Mirror

Check the specs!

The DayStar Genesis mac clone series was wild! (For those that aren't familar, see this: http://www.lowendmac.com/daystar/ and this: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ULTIMATE_MAC/Elvis/inde x.html). Back in the day, it was one hellof machine. Up to four PowerPC 604e CPUs on the CPU card. 16 DIMM slots, 6 PCI slots. Not bad for 1997.

Because Mac OS Classic's multithreading was app-dependant, only "pro" apps such as Photoshop supported the additional CPUs. But when they did, whoa, did that thing ever haul.

But it was on the PowerMac version of BeOS that the DayStar really shined. The coolest thing was the CPU meter app in BeOS. You could click on and click off CPUs at will. Turn off two CPUs and watch the load on the other two increase. Click off all four, and poof, the OS halted! (they later fixed that "feature").

Anyway.... yeah, the old DayStar Genesis was awesome.

Anyone remember the Macintosh Portable? I stumbled across one of these last year at a computer junkyard. Never got it working, the power management chip was blown out. But from disassembling it and reassembling it several times, believe me, this was an amazing machine. You don't even need a screwdriver to take it apart and put it back together-- everything snaps nicely into place!

Macintosh Portable article on lowendmac.com

• Xerox Alto
• Apple Lisa
• Apple Macintosh

Go ahead, use your ugly clones.

Once more time proving that Microsoft can not innovate, just copy.

--Volrath50

Once again, an Apple innovation is stolen by a PC company six years later.

The first iMac to offer DVD was the 400 MHz iMac DV, which, as a matter of fact, did offer hardware MPEG-2 decoding through its ATI Rage 128 VR graphics.

--

hmm, i'm not sure why, but this sounds a little familiar to me... let's hope that the marketing is a little better this time around.

The "Aqua" GUI for OS X is based on vector graphics, handled by the graphics card instead of the CPU. The pre-G3 Macs did not ship with very good graphics cards (they were okay for the time, but are pathetic by today's standards). "Aqua" was written to run on ATI, nVidia, and little else.

That is why older Macs that were upgraded (like the 7500 and 9500, very popular models to drop a G3 into) are not officially supported by OS X.

Of course, somebody will probably drop a PCI video card into a 7500 and try it out before long. If they do, their result will probably show up on low end mac or somewhere like that.

I don't subscribe to the notion that these are in opposition to one another. That OpenBSD is not always the answer is very true. But all good things have their purposes. In fact, I use them both in my segmented, handy-man-special, home network:

OpenBSD for Mac68K (all these were bought for a pittance on eBay):
2 Quadra 700s: transparent firewall (ipf) and 3-legged NAT (ipnat)
Quadra 610: mail server (qmail)
Centris 610 (w/68040): dns server (djbdns)

LinuxPPC: (Bastille'd by using the Sparc trick on the FAQ)
2 7300s: apache and MySQL (soon to be PostgreSQL?)
9500/G3: mol / streaming with videod, icecast (Better choices are welcome.)
Pismo PowerBook: dual boot

I haven't had as many years using Linux (only 2) as you have. And aside from that my computer experience amounts to a few mid-'80s semesters of VAXen and the entire life of the Mac platform -- and around 4 months of NetBSD and OpenBSD. But I have to say it (adding BSD to the mix) hasn't been that hard at all. There are many similarities with Linux. Much of your current knowledge will transfer. For anyone who has learned guitar and then tried bass, or ukulele, you've experienced this before.

-B...

I don't subscribe to the notion that these are in opposition to one another. That OpenBSD is not always the answer is very true. But all good things have their purposes. In fact, I use them both in my segmented, handy-man-special, home network:

OpenBSD for Mac68K (all these were bought for a pittance on eBay):
2 Quadra 700s: transparent firewall (ipf) and 3-legged NAT (ipnat)
Quadra 610: mail server (qmail)
Centris 610 (w/68040): dns server (djbdns)

LinuxPPC: (Bastille'd by using the Sparc trick on the FAQ)
2 7300s: apache and MySQL (soon to be PostgreSQL?)
9500/G3: mol / streaming with videod, icecast (Better choices are welcome.)
Pismo PowerBook: dual boot

I haven't had as many years using Linux (only 2) as you have. And aside from that my computer experience amounts to a few mid-'80s semesters of VAXen and the entire life of the Mac platform -- and around 4 months of NetBSD and OpenBSD. But I have to say it (adding BSD to the mix) hasn't been that hard at all. There are many similarities with Linux. Much of your current knowledge will transfer. For anyone who has learned guitar and then tried bass, or ukulele, you've experienced this before.

-B...

I don't subscribe to the notion that these are in opposition to one another. That OpenBSD is not always the answer is very true. But all good things have their purposes. In fact, I use them both in my segmented, handy-man-special, home network:

OpenBSD for Mac68K (all these were bought for a pittance on eBay):
2 Quadra 700s: transparent firewall (ipf) and 3-legged NAT (ipnat)
Quadra 610: mail server (qmail)
Centris 610 (w/68040): dns server (djbdns)

LinuxPPC: (Bastille'd by using the Sparc trick on the FAQ)
2 7300s: apache and MySQL (soon to be PostgreSQL?)
9500/G3: mol / streaming with videod, icecast (Better choices are welcome.)
Pismo PowerBook: dual boot

I haven't had as many years using Linux (only 2) as you have. And aside from that my computer experience amounts to a few mid-'80s semesters of VAXen and the entire life of the Mac platform -- and around 4 months of NetBSD and OpenBSD. But I have to say it (adding BSD to the mix) hasn't been that hard at all. There are many similarities with Linux. Much of your current knowledge will transfer. For anyone who has learned guitar and then tried bass, or ukulele, you've experienced this before.

-B...

I don't subscribe to the notion that these are in opposition to one another. That OpenBSD is not always the answer is very true. But all good things have their purposes. In fact, I use them both in my segmented, handy-man-special, home network:

OpenBSD for Mac68K (all these were bought for a pittance on eBay):
2 Quadra 700s: transparent firewall (ipf) and 3-legged NAT (ipnat)
Quadra 610: mail server (qmail)
Centris 610 (w/68040): dns server (djbdns)

LinuxPPC: (Bastille'd by using the Sparc trick on the FAQ)
2 7300s: apache and MySQL (soon to be PostgreSQL?)
9500/G3: mol / streaming with videod, icecast (Better choices are welcome.)
Pismo PowerBook: dual boot

I haven't had as many years using Linux (only 2) as you have. And aside from that my computer experience amounts to a few mid-'80s semesters of VAXen and the entire life of the Mac platform -- and around 4 months of NetBSD and OpenBSD. But I have to say it (adding BSD to the mix) hasn't been that hard at all. There are many similarities with Linux. Much of your current knowledge will transfer. For anyone who has learned guitar and then tried bass, or ukulele, you've experienced this before.

-B...

I don't subscribe to the notion that these are in opposition to one another. That OpenBSD is not always the answer is very true. But all good things have their purposes. In fact, I use them both in my segmented, handy-man-special, home network:

OpenBSD for Mac68K (all these were bought for a pittance on eBay):
2 Quadra 700s: transparent firewall (ipf) and 3-legged NAT (ipnat)
Quadra 610: mail server (qmail)
Centris 610 (w/68040): dns server (djbdns)

LinuxPPC: (Bastille'd by using the Sparc trick on the FAQ)
2 7300s: apache and MySQL (soon to be PostgreSQL?)
9500/G3: mol / streaming with videod, icecast (Better choices are welcome.)
Pismo PowerBook: dual boot

I haven't had as many years using Linux (only 2) as you have. And aside from that my computer experience amounts to a few mid-'80s semesters of VAXen and the entire life of the Mac platform -- and around 4 months of NetBSD and OpenBSD. But I have to say it (adding BSD to the mix) hasn't been that hard at all. There are many similarities with Linux. Much of your current knowledge will transfer. For anyone who has learned guitar and then tried bass, or ukulele, you've experienced this before.

-B...

Not necessarily...an SE/30 can have as much as 128MB of RAM inside of it if you can find 8 rare 16MB 30 pin SIMMs, and 32MB with more common 4mb SIMMs in it. Put a decent HD in the thing, use System 7.5.5 (free as in Free Beer) plus Mode32 to cure the 32 bit uncleanness prob, and you have a very capable machine.

The only limitation to such a machine would be the black-and-white screen. But you only need color for the Web, right? OK, there is a Mac port of Lynx out there for text web surfing, there is Eudora Lite for your email, there is Newswatcher for Usenet, Fetch for FTP, Better Telnet for telnet/SSH, and ircle for IRC. Only ircle is shareware and the cost is a mere $20. MacTCP 2.0.6 and Open Transport 1.1 both come with System 7.5.5, and a good PPP dialer can be had in FreePPP.

The modem port only supports 33.6 modems or slower, but since you aren't using the graphical Web this isn't a big deal.

So for less than $100 one can get an SE/30 like the one you sold up and running on the Web. Talk about Still useful after all these years !

read also this rumour from the same author about the cube

Borg Sue Apple Over Cube

sulli

Also, if you just scroll down the page, you can see that the headlines for "Recently on The Rumor Mill" are absurd. Take, for example "Borg Sue Apple Over Cube", an article about how The Borg from Start Trek say that the G4 cube idea was taken from their spaceship design. Also, there's "Professional Baseball sues Apple over sphere", which talks about how spherical speakers look like baseballs.

Look at this page, which says

It's amazingly easy to create a rumor with no basis in reality that sounds as good as anything the rumor sites publish.

Well, I guess they were right about that, eh? =)

They break the news that Apple is being sued by the Borg over the G4 cube.

No.

When an Apple user says "Beige G3", they mean the pre-Jobs model, which had an older motherboard design and was installed in the same towers as the old 604-PPC Macs. The term is used to differentiate them from the "Blue and White" (or just "B&W") G3 towers, which are the spiffy ones that open like a drawbridge, have a rippin' fast mobo, and use PC100 memory. You can check here for a list of the various models.

The iMacs that shipped in multiple "flavors" were identical, except for the casing. Every model that came out during that time period was available in all colors, except for the bottom-of-the-line cheapie, which was blue only.

Being from Minnesota, I kind of would have liked to have had a purple iMac, so I could sitck Vikings horns on the side to make it look like a big football helmet, but I never really had any need for an iMac. I need the PCI slots, so I bought a B&W G3 tower instead.

Or you can speculate about vaguely remembered rumors of recalls. Up to you. :)

For good info on individual models, including some of their weird cases, I would start at Low End Mac, and if you can't find it there, follow their link to MacFixIt.

Mac Central is updated daily, and hosts Andy Inahtko's columns.

Low End Mac Posts links to everything interesting about macs (including the occational link to /.) and has detailed specs for the entire mac line, 1984 - today.

MacWeek sucks, but they cover the trade shows fairly well.

Mac News Network seems to me like it is mostly a forum for product releases and press statements, but a lot of people consider it a favorite. (They were the first one I saw publish the ETA for the Diablo II port, so there's one notch on their belt, anyway.)

And of course, there is the new kid on the block, MacSlash, who took the slash code, and added ugly aqua-themed graphics to it.

Sure, it's butt-ugly (white with your choice of blue or orange), big (11.6" x 13.5" x 2.1"), and weighs a lot (6.6 pounds with the battery), but it's...

fairly cheap ($1599, last time I checked),
fairly fast (G3 chip w/ full cache... much faster than most PIII notebooks, which are crippled to reduce heat),
has a really nice-looking LCD screen,
has the cheapest wireless networking option of anybody out there,
and has a battery that lasts 5-6 hours (ymmv).

Best of all, thanks to LinuxPPC, they are great Linux portables.

No PCMCIA, but most of the stuff that you would use cards for (Ethernet, wireless networking, modem, USB) are already built in, so that's no great loss for most users.

Of course, if you can't get past how goofy it looks, maybe the Transmetta laptops are worth the wait.

Either way, I would hate to pay much for a Pentium-based laptop. They are slow, hot, and suck power too quickly.

There is an article on Low End Mac about how Slashdot is prejudiced against Apple news. Don't you all think that it's time for this religious war to end, now that Mac OS X is a flavor of Unix? Both camps have a lot to learn from each other. We should rally together to topple Windows domination.

I have an old 6300 sitting around, same problem. It used to be in my dad's closet, and I said, "Hey, gimme that dusty PowerMac, I'll stick some Unix on it and use it as a firewall." Everything I've tried to do with this box has resulted in failure. Running Linux or BSD is out of the question because it's so screwed up, and even adding Ethernet (and getting it to work under MacOS) is gonna be a bitch.

Here's a nice list of Mac models to avoid, including your 5300 and my 6300. These are the worst boxes Apple ever made. No future at all. Depressing. *sigh*

Instead of getting an IP for each appliance in your household, why not just set up an X-10 system? I have one set up in my Manhattan apt run by a 10 year-old Mac SE/30 using Thinking Home Software. It monitors motion detectors, light detectors, outdoor weather station and runs lamps, an air conditioner, air filters and a coffee maker. I can communicate with it securely over the Internet (try to do that with a 10 year-old 286 PC running a GUI) and either turn on/turn off lights, etc. or be informed if someone has walked in -- complete with a Connectix QuickCam picture.

As for ease, I think an X-10 system is much better than trying to rig every freaking household appliance with an IP. This also sounds like another excuse for big corps to sell us more stuff we don't need anyways. X-10 allows you to existing electrical appliances.

Are you kidding,the memory sticks are smaller. If you said smartmedia it would have made sense. A bunch of match size memory sticks for songs will be lost in 3 hours.


A perfect size will be a minidisksize thing that carries enormous data. So typeII pci card is ok. Anythings has the CD/DVD size should all go straight to hell. The portable DVD player is cool and all that. But it's just too large for portable. I would buy a DV player(player, not recorder) if I have dough.


CY

I can't see what is so innovative about the NEC Z1 visually. This is just a 2 year late Wintel knock-off of the 20th Anniversary Macintosh. Been There, Done That design.

Take a gander of what NEC is ripping off here:
http://lowendmac.com/ppc/tam.shtml

Boy, aren't those Wintel manufacturers are on the leading edge of design! That's what's great about Mac. What I get today, you Windows folks get tomorrow. Plus, as a bonus, I still can run everything you can as well, today -- Both Windows and Unix(Linux, NetBSD & MacOS X -- oops you can't run that).

There's flame for thought...

pax,
toupsie

But that's not the point really. The point is that G4 is not ready for introduction in Lombard before the Sawtooth desktop systems expected around MWNY this July. Lombard is a done machine, its production is ramping up in Taiwan right now, but has had some setbacks, which has thus delayed its introduction. It runs on the g3 processor, there really is no doubt about that. The guy who wrote the infoworld article may have just been fed real bad information by a reader or fell victim to one of Apple's notorious leak-detecting far-out rumors. Much like the apple/disney/pixar merger rumors that AppleInsider fell for.

Also, by reading some of the other posts, the codenames of Apple's PowerBooks are of much interest and intrigue. Yes, The Powerbook G3 Series is codenamed Wallstreet (and there was a low end version codenamed Mainstreet). Then the next PowerBook codenamed Lombard is named after the street in San Francisco, but it also has the additional codename of 101. This is from the highway in California named 101, which is renamed Lombard street when it reaches downtown San Francisco. Neat, huh? The connection of Lombard with the street in Britain akin to America's financial district has been recognized as well.If you want to go way into the future, speculation on the next generation after Lombard/101 says the machine may be codenamed 102, but that's likely to change as we get closer to that product's timeframe.

Doug