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So What? AltiVec is going to make have huge impact on the graphic, video, audio, scientific, voice recognition and gaming world (and probably others). AltiVec is NOT MMX. Here is a quote from MacOSRumors' report for Sept 15th comparing a G3 using OS 8.6 and a G4 using OS 9 (which has an AltiVec optimized version of Open-GL).

OpenGL-based games and rendering applications simply screamed with even a single 450MHz G4, between 4 and 10 times faster than the same apps running on a 450MHz G3.

Note that there was NO difference in the applications being run (i.e. the applications aren't AltiVec optimized), the G4 was using a Yosemite motherboard (i.e. the same slow memory system as the G3), the only difference was that Open-GL in OS-9 is AltiVec enhanced.

The real bottleneck in PCs (a blanket term including Macs) is the bus. No one except SGI and Sun are doing anything interesting about the bus bottleneck problem.

The Sawtooth motherboards (using MaxBus) TRIPLE the memory speed and DOUBLE the PCI speeds of the Yosemite boards. I would classify doubling and tripling speeds as interesting. According to reports Apple and AIM are on track to fully support PC266 RAM once it's availabale.

Enough of this, eh? Here is an excerpt from the MacOSRumors information posted today.

"Very importantly, it has been confirmed by reliable Apple sources that the company is planning to include fix for the G4 upgrade block installed with the latest Blue G3 Firmware. Apparently, the decision to develop the block code was extremely controversial within Apple, and even its proponents generally stated that their intentions were only to provide insurance that Apple was not"surprise attacked" by third parties shipping G4 upgrades before Apple was able to ship their own G4 machine.

Secondly, MOSR has confirmed that the recent confusion over whether the new Sawtooth-based G4s were processor-upgradable was caused by outdated diagrams of the board. Once more recent
versions were uncovered, it was clear that the Boot ROM continues to reside on the main board, and there are no obvious barriers in hardware nor software for the new G4s to be upgraded for years to come.

In a related note, we were surprised to hear from several third party developers that not only had they succesfully used prototype multiple-G4 upgrade boards on Beige and Blue G3s...at least one has also completed a proof-of-concept test for a multi-G4 card that would support the use of the 128-bit, enhanced-performance MaxBus as a "backplane" bus for the processors and cache chips to use for incredibly efficient inter-processor communication -- but would still be compatible with all upgradable PowerPC Macs and their 64-bit "60x" bus protocol. MaxBus, which many insiders had previously not expected to be applied to the Mac until mid to late 2000, could offer dramatic benefits even in this only partial implementation."




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Check out Mac OS Rumors. The article for today (9/7) mentions that they are working on the firmware patch to the G3's mentioned on AppleInsider, but also that the decision to put it there in the first place was very controversial and was mainly intended to insure that 3rd-party processor upgrade makers didn't beat them to the market with a G4. Still not very nice, but not as ogre-like as forever baring G3 owners from upgrading. Plus the G4s themselves are easily processor upgradable for future SMP cards. It may not be as bad as AppleInsider makes it out to be. Plus, this is just an early prototype. The earlier Sawtooth prototypes also had the boot ROM on the processor daughtercard rather than the motherboard as it is currently.

Here is a link with more (true) info about the upcoming iMac (codenamed C2 or Kihei):
http://www.macosrumors.com/imac.html

Also "Mac OS Rumors" is running a story today about the upcoming iMac:
http://www.macosrumors.com/

Here is a link with more (true) info about the upcoming iMac (codenamed C2 or Kihei):
http://www.macosrumors.com/imac.html

Also "Mac OS Rumors" is running a story today about the upcoming iMac:
http://www.macosrumors.com/

According to this story (Blue G3/Grey G4 upgrades -- good news! [16:37 9/7]) Apple will be reenabling the firmware soon, now that they have released G4 machines of their own.

(Besides, Apple has to ramp up production of iBooks and the new PowerMac- where are they going to make iMacs?)

I found this a while ago before the G4 even came out. It seems that MacOS Rumors got it to work with little problems. Check it out for yourself.

The Yosemite G4 question

Read todays MacOSRumors and its blurb on Altivec. Nothing definitive, but enough enthusiasm to make you wonder. It's that sort of 'I wish I could brag about the killer machine I'm using' attitude... MacOSRumors isn't typically prone to exaggerating. Can't wait to plug a G4 into my old 7500!

NT's Kernel is fine...there are no problems there. The bloat comes in at the interface and application levels, for the most part.

That is why NT fared so well in those benchmarks against Linux...they didn't install crap like MS Office on those boxes, it really was OS vs. OS.

As to the size of the Kernel 2MB is about right.

As to what you can install it on ?

I installed Windows NT Advanced Server 3.1 on a 486/33 w 8MB!!! I had to turn off networking during install, and then install networking after I had NT running...but it ran.

I installed NT Workstation 4.0 on a Compaq P90 with 8MB. It was unusable but ran. I later upgraded that machine to a second HD which I used solely for the swap file...it was usable barely with MSoffice 95. Things were much better when I moved the machine to 24 MB and upgraded to 2MB video memory.

I find the NT 3.5x OS to be VERY stable, much more so than pre 2.0.x Linux. NT 4 is as stable or more stable than Linux as a workstation. When something goes bad you can kill services and restart them. Just like any reasonable OS

If the GUI goes though...you have to reboot. That said the GUI is much more stable than X/KDE or X/Gnome.

NT is NOT as bad as Linux folk think. NT is MUCH worse than MS thinks. NT bears NO RELATION to what MS marketing says.

NT is the best general purpose workstation available right now. I have great expectations for MacOS X. [See Mac OS Rumors for why. if you don't already know.]

Linux is really coming along here, way ahead of even a year ago. It'll be a while yet. I think MacOS X will give a good example of what to aim for/above in the future of Linux interfaces.

Sun is the best enterprise server solution.

I use Linux for small and medium business sized servers and light database applications. The availability of Oracle and IBMDB2 is making me think of using it for larger databases, maybe I'll ask the next client to try it out.

I use Sun and Linux for special purpose workstations. I always prefer Linux for this if the application is available. (Sometimes they really want Autocad OK ?)

I ran into a bank that needs a supercomputer, I still don't really understand thier application. I am going to try to fit the app to Beowulf.

I know this went a bit off topic, nonetheless I hope it was thoughtful, if not neccessarily useful.

The codec does not belong to Apple. The license it from Sorenson. If you want to, you can call up Sorenson and license it too. Go for it. As to "buy it out and pretend it's free", that's Microsoft's strategy. Apple didn't buy Quicktime, it invented it. Apple did buy NeXT, but there was no streaming server in NeXT.

Power Computing. It was competition. So it was removed.

No, it was a mistake on Apple's part, so it was corrected. Apple still generates most of it's profit in hardware. Power Computing was licensed to sell MacOS-based systems, and they were not playing by the rules. If Apple had not ended cloning, all the clones and Apple too would have gone out of business.

PPCLinux. It didn't suit Apple. So specs were withheld. Same with BeOS (sorta.. Be is a diff case)

That's a BS lie passed areound by Be Inc. so that they can only develop new stuff for Intel. LinuxPPC runs on every Mac Apple sells, including the B&W G3s and the iMac. Why can LinuxPPC do it and Be can't, especially when the LinuxPPC source code is open-source? Sounds to me like Be is at fault here.

Quicktime. It once was just a nice free client. Now it's got a 'Pro' edition. Plus the fact that Apple is gripping the codecs like they're made of pure gold.

There is still a free Quicktime client. You're faulting Apple because they want to make money? How dare they, you say! Apple is a company, and their goal is to make money. Next you're going to be upset because they won't give you a G3 for free!

Then there are the legalese issues on the ASPL. I'm no lawyer so I can't touch on them. But I hope they're reviewed and fixed.

Apple revised their open-source license, and most people in the OSS community are happy with th new form of it.

Plus, whatever happened to that issue with OSX/Apache crashing..?

Well, if you followed Apple news, you'd know that this has been fixed in the Mac OSX Developer Preview 1 (see MacOSRumors from the other day for info on DP1, it sounds awesome).

Anyway.. I just have to say that Apple is really annoying me. I thought underdogs were the friendlier ones? But Apple doesn't seem to think so. Their playing monopoly with only a few of the cheaper streets and some houses. MS at least can't DO anything monopolistic right now, the DOJ is all over them.

Monopoly? Why, because they open-sourced their next generation OS (Darwin) and a high-performance RTP/RTSP server? Sounds pretty consumer/user friendly to me!

Well there's my ramble for the night/morning. As nice as Apple is being with the limited amount of Open Sourcing they're doing, they still aren't quite coming off friendly. How would we react if MS opened a small part of a program to Open Source and kept everything else under raps, including continued monopoly plays? Food for thought.

If they open-sourced the whole thing, they'd go out of business. They are open-sourcing more things than you hear about though. What about OpenPlay? Thanks to that, OpenPlay will exist on linux (being ported by Loki now for use in Myth II), and we'll have a cross-platform (Mac, Windows, and UNIX/Linux) network gaming transport layer that's free for everyone. That's a good contribution from Apple you don't hear about often.

Cut Apple some slack. They're still the best thing going in the commercial realm, and OSX is gonna rock.

My bets are on Jobs's ego. He has more ego than anyone else in Silicon Valley, and isn't going to sell Apple for anything (unless Jobs has been replaced by a space alien.) Apple is his baby. He almost went shit nuts when Sculley forced him out.

He's not going to let someone else be in charge of Apple. Especially since most companies think using what's most conventional and what's most popular is the way to do business.

Apple's been the biggest innovator in computing for years. If it gets sold to anyone else, it will die.

J.

The real question is, does Apple have the resolve to actually move over to OSX in the next few years?

They will have to endure making their entire software base obsolete, and hope that people will write software for the new OS. If they can't make it through the transition, they will be just as dead as Micro$hit will inevitably become.

"They will have to endure making their entire hardware base obsolete (by migrating to a RISC architecture)". Sound familiar? You have to admit, if anyone can pull off a massive migration like this, Apple's got the track record. And as far as writing for the new OS, I haven't heard anything but praise for it. Not from reviewers, from my friends who've used it.

Heres an update from MacOSRumors:

UPDATE: Thus far, ten readers have written in with reports -- so far, only one has been able to duplicate this problem using C'Ts script...and at Black Light, with our testbed OS X Server machine, the script did not cause any errors. Discussing the problem with Apple turned up the fact that depending on configuration, some (possibly many) OS X Server installs appear to be proof against the problem. One suggestion from Cupertino is to disable as many other service daemons as possible on your server to maximize your chances -- and, of course, this also improves memory usage and overall performance.

End quote. Thus far it isn't a 100% reproducible bug. That being the case, anyone know how Apple knows what/how to fix it? Regardless, lets see how fast Apple can fix this...


-AS

This morning's MacOSRumors page has some additional information about the problem. It seems to not be as easy to do as the c't article makes it appear. It is definately a problem, but it's not as easy to do as they make it out.

Here's a clip of an article from MacOS Rumors (a great Mac news site).

"Later in the year, the "C2" iMac will ship (release dates have fluctuated, but what is known is that "it will ship before the school year begins." This will start at either 350 or 366MHz, depending on Apple's RAM specification plans. Speculation with a strong basis in fact points to Apple plans to spec' this machine with a standard 64MB of SDRAM. There will reportedly be at least one DVD configuration, graphics will be provided by a version of the RAGE 128 graphics chip with 8MB of SGRAM, and Firewire will be on-board. Rumors of PCI slots capable of accepting 5" cards continue to be unconfirmed and considered unreliable. The C2 is expected to retail for $999."

There's your $999 price point and with FireWire. I want one. Even if you don't like the MacOS, I think this would make an awesome Linux machine. Anyone working on FireWire drivers for Linux?
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OSX is vapor.

OS X is NOT vapor. To say that it is, you must be quite uninformed--whether by choice or by circumstance. Is NeXTStep or OpenStep vapor as well? No, they've been around since what...? 1986? Well, Mac OS X = Rhapsody, which is essentially PowerPC OpenStep with a Mac interface and Mac software/technology compatability. Also, Mac OS X Server, the "rough cut" of Mac OS X is shipping, right now, in February. I don't know where you come from, but in my world shipping software isn't vaporware.

Oh...I almost forgot, you will be able to use the BASH shell in Mac OS X Server. Happy now?

To clue in:

Officially: Apple's Mac OS X Server page

Unofficially: Mac OS Rumors (a Slashdot affiliate site--part of Black Light Media)

Baz

First, go to MacOSRumors for the latest on the MacOS X kernel. Apple has some of the smartest people in the industry churning out what appears to be the most complete and robust OS yet. The first OS allowing you to both use the best UI AND go down to the command line. Finally and Apple os that uses the PPC to the max, with a fast, responsive UI, great dev tools, tons of features, all the buzzwords and then some, Quicktime, OpenGL, AppleScript, and lots more. When this comes out, i defy ANY ONE who posts here not to at least want to try it once.

It will turn the heads of NT-Centric IT folks

It may finally bring respect to Apple from the *NIX camp.

It will have the highest adoption rate of any OS when it comes out. Fancy boxes aside, this OS will sell hardware. Fast. I cant wait to benchmark it...