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I have the exact opposite experience; I don't remember anyone with big problems with any of the clones. I'm still a proud owner of a Power Computing Power Tower Pro 225... never had a hardware problem with the computer itself in about 10 years of ownership (and about 5 years of daily use). It was a dream compared to its Apple-branded sibling the 9500 and it benchmarked faster at the same speed CPUs. Great advertising too. I also administered another clone, UMAX J700 I believe; it wasn't nearly as sweet but it gave me no trouble in terms of hardware. And I never heard anything but praise for the Daystar Millennium (I think that's what they were called) which could sport up to 4 PPC chips (though not a lot of software would use all CPUs at the time). There probably were some crappy clones out too but they didn't do as well.

First thing I thought of after reading the headline were these ads PowerComputing ran during their peak in the industry.

(R.I.P. PowerTower Pro series.)

suggesting Apple makes far better use of its two CPUs than the Xeon machine....the results augur well for Apple G5 performance in technical and scientific computing environments and for playing games.'"

But isn't life just a game? =)

I agree.

--

Dear Mr. best ever,

Why do you render my status bar useless with javascript mouseovers? Are you trying to disguise the state-of-the-art directory structure behind your site?

Of the recent 5k contest, which design did you like the best?

The second place site in the 5k contest is my favorite. My only fear, however, is that we may be seeing the newest version of Microsoft Paint.

Recently there was a web design contest that had a very interesting constraint. All entries had to be less than 5K, with no server side help (Note: The contest is closed now). There were over 1,000 entries and it really generated a lot of buzz. Many egos are at stake here! The FAQ indicates that there were five DHTML recreations of Space Invaders, four versions of Simon, and six 3d Maze games! All less than 5K. People can do more with less.

The reason I mention this is that file size, download time, and bandwidth are critically important to all kinds of people. The contest I mention reflects a kind interesting return to the basics. What can you do with as little as possible? People of all types, from programmers to artists to system admins, actually want to do more with less, but they don't for a number of reasons. Argh!

Perhaps the internet pipes that companies are building are less necessary than we are being told. Certainly the need would decrease if we could remove layer after layer of bloat.

While some applications need the power, many don't. More and more features don't necessarily mean you're getting a better application. Quite the opposite is often true.

Theory: More bandwidth is being requested because too people are lazy or because executives are too stupid to facilitate good coding and project management. The average geek certainly doesn't want to be lazy; the average geek is detail oriented and they want to kick ass. Small, useful applications are beatiful things. In any event, I wonder how much a pipe most people really would need to have if we were all able to be more effecient from day to day.

John S. Rhodes
Usability and a whole lot more...
http://webword.com

from their FAQ:

How about client-side processing? Can I use JavaScript? What if the page shows up as larger than 5k in the browser as a result of the scripting?

Client-side scripting, including the use of scripts which write out additional HTML (i.e., by using JavaScript's "document.write()" function) are permitted. The size component of the judging will be done by examining the files which sit on the server, not the browser's rendering of those files. The normal caveats apply however (see the next question); make sure you are confident about your scripts running in the judges' browsers. Also, please note that gratuituous exploitation of this provision may cause low marks by some judges in the concept & originality category.


The server side question is answered elsewhere in the FAQ--clearly not allowed. What's interesting is that client side scripting could be used to generate much more than 5k worth of HTML, as long as the original page on the server is less than 5k. Of course, you'll want to read the entire FAQ for any caveats.

FAQ available at http://www.sylloge.com/5k/faq.html.

numb

Here's a link to the actual contest rules and so forth.