Slashdot Mirror

"... the [Clinton-era] Forest Service actually relied on public comment when it developed its "roadless rule," intended to protect 58 million acres of undeveloped national forest from most commercial logging and road building. It drew 1.6 million comments, the most ever in the history of federal rule-making. Almost all the comments -- 95 percent -- supported the protections but wanted the plan to go even further, which it eventually did.

But the Bush administration delayed putting the rule into effect and sought more comments, receiving 726,000. Of those, it said that only 52,000, or 7 percent, were "original," meaning that the administration discounted 93 percent of the comments. The rule is now being challenged in court."

There's a very, very big irony here. The Bush team just got caught with their pants down by bloggers and others including Mike Magee at the Inquirer. It turns out they were sending out massive fake form emails to papers around the country, and bribing folks to sign their own names to them with "GOPoints" they could trade for prizes.

That story is now crossing over to the mainstream press with articles in Monday's New York Times. and (more intelligently) Paul Boutin's Slate article.

Another big irony: this story has been riding Blogdex for a week--a long techno-duel of marketing droids versus nerds armed mainly with Google. And the nerds won! Probably the only place you couldn't follow the action was here on Slashdot, the story was rejected three times. So the Superbowl is a better example of news that matters?

Inquirer article with screenshots of prizes you get for spamming your local paper.

"... the [Clinton-era] Forest Service actually relied on public comment when it developed its "roadless rule," intended to protect 58 million acres of undeveloped national forest from most commercial logging and road building. It drew 1.6 million comments, the most ever in the history of federal rule-making. Almost all the comments -- 95 percent -- supported the protections but wanted the plan to go even further, which it eventually did.

But the Bush administration delayed putting the rule into effect and sought more comments, receiving 726,000. Of those, it said that only 52,000, or 7 percent, were "original," meaning that the administration discounted 93 percent of the comments. The rule is now being challenged in court."

There's a very, very big irony here. The Bush team just got caught with their pants down by bloggers and others including Mike Magee at the Inquirer. It turns out they were sending out massive fake form emails to papers around the country, and bribing folks to sign their own names to them with "GOPoints" they could trade for prizes.

That story is now crossing over to the mainstream press with articles in Monday's New York Times. and (more intelligently) Paul Boutin's Slate article.

Another big irony: this story has been riding Blogdex for a week--a long techno-duel of marketing droids versus nerds armed mainly with Google. And the nerds won! Probably the only place you couldn't follow the action was here on Slashdot, the story was rejected three times. So the Superbowl is a better example of news that matters?

Inquirer article with screenshots of prizes you get for spamming your local paper.

Chips with higher densities are more fragile, and therefore will give lower yields.

Tell that to Intel They seem to have increased the circuit density, wafer size, performance and yield, all while reducing consumption.

Actually, reusing this water is one of the priorities of a few notable chip manufacturers right now. Not only are we learning how to reduse the amount of water used, but we're cleaning as much of it as we can afterward.

If you ask me, I think the biggest news in this article is that people aren't aware of what goes into making products that they take for granted. It's not like it takes alot of effort to realize that alot of energy and chemicals are required to make microchips. It's just that only a small minority of us actually pay attention.

It's probably mixed with chemicals and sprayed on at some point and then dribbles through catchbasins.

Actually the majority of it is probably used for cooling.

The Inquirer has an article that takes a look at the GeForceFX. Hopefully things won't turn out as they did for 3DFX.

according to this Inquirer article.

You're right, and I'm actually really stoked about this decision. Read this to see another take on the situation.

I like the idea of users being able to encrypt all their stuff without having to install additional software. Am I reading this right?

is adding DES hardware support, which can be used for all kinds of stuff, but doesn't mean that they built in TCPA (see also this article. I think the DES hardware can be very useful, especially for brute forcing keys ;).

-----

Transmeta pokes Trusted Computing plans in eye

Invents own X86 security extensions

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 14 January 2003, 11:54

DAVID DITZEL AT Transmeta talked about the firm's plans for implementing Palladium in future CPUs in Japan, at the end of November.

See Ditzel Person talks about Transmeta and Palladium.

But now it's official, it seems.

The firm said today it has silicon for a TM 5800 chip with built in embedded security.

Information theft is a major concern to consumers, businesses and governments, said Matthew Perry, the firm's CEO today.

The chips will support the Advanced Encryption Standard but it says that the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) adds cost and increases design complexity and system space requirements.

The Crusoe chips will include an engine, in hardware, for symmetric encryption algorithms including the Data Encryption Standard (DES), DES-X and Triple DES. It's slow in software, but Transmeta reckons it's good in hardware.

The security features will be implemented using Transmeta Security Extensions (TSX) to the X86 instruction set it employs.

So that's one in the eye for the TCPA from Transmeta, we guess.

"Static Control Components" buckled under the threat, and agreed to stop making the chips.

Story here

Looks like Lexmark won round one. I hope they don't get too much further.

At any rate, this is just *another* example of how stupid the DMCA is and how it's being used way out of its scope.
How many more examples do we need? Geez..

SGI like all server companies cannot drop their customer base suddenly and leave then stranded. They will carry on developing IRIX and MIPS systems and softly let them die. Just like HP with Alpha read this (funny) also shame.
Yeah they have done a lot of stuff for Linux and the boxes do contain lots of their own stuff but its a large step down from making their fully own hardware (very novel stuff) and Irix down to using Itanics and doing Linux hacking.
When a company gets down to that level and gives up their uniqueness then they are no longer special (in my hart anyway).
Afterall there is no end of companies about to release multi intanic systems.

There was a hoax that Sony owed money to Nintendo over the name of the Playstation. It turned out to a hoax. Here's the full story:

Sony, Nintendo Playstation story "a hoax"
The Inquirer

Letters Amy beware

By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 19 December 2002, 13:37

Subject: Nintendo enjoys a 10 per cent slice of Sony's Playstation profits
Hi Paul,

Just read your article titled "Nintendo enjoys a 10 per cent slice of Sony's Playstation profits", and noticed you mention don't remember the original story.

I remember back in the days of owning my SuperNES, reading of a plan (and seeing some "artists impressions" of what it would look like) to produce a CD drive add on for the system. The SNES console would site on top of the unit, connected by its expansion port. The idea being, I believe, was to upgrade the capabilities of the SNES, and allow larger games to be loaded from CD-ROMS. The article I read at the time specifically mentioned that the CD unit was going to be produced by Sony.

I don't remember it being called anything along the lines of Playstation, I think it was to be called the SuperCD, similar to the MegaCD add-on for the Sega Megadrive.

I suspect Nintendo saw the "success" of the Sega MegaCD and canned it accordingly!

10% of the Playstation profits seems a rather large amount to be paid to Nintendo just off the back of this project alone, however I do recall more recently reading a related article which mentioned that the Playstation evolved out of this project, and in fact every Playstation more or less contained a SNES... This of course may just be something else to toss onto the rumour mill!

Ben

Subject: Nintendo enjoys a 10 per cent slice of Sony's Playstation profits

Hiya,

Nintendo might well have an interest in the Playstation name. It is indeed true that the original, never to be released, Playstation was a CDROM for the SNES. My memory is rusty over whether it was a genuine joint venture, I seem to remember that Nintendo paid Sony to develop the gizmo (which included an updated graphics chip). Nintendo, for whatever reason, decided they didn't like the project and Sony decided that they did like it. Hence Sony went off and developed a full on Playstation. However, it would not surprise me if Nintendo originally financing/sponsoring the project gave them some right to the name.

Arron

Subject: Nintendo enjoys a 10 per cent slice of Sony's Playstation profits

Hi

Inquirer often reports rumours, but please, you should do _some_ filtering at least. One source in the whole world for a _MAJOR_ news item (consoletalk). News that, if true, would have to be told to stock owners first (press release etc.) and that would make headlines at CNN. ...slashdot really is no source for news, the "editors" are a joke ;).

Jussi Lassila

I think the story that was posted on the Consoletalk site was a hoax. Someone sent the story to me yesterday, but decided not to post it after i didnt find anything backing the story up. News that big would have been reported on the Sony/Nintendo websites, or if there was an announcement, in some Japanese newspapers at least. It seems right before /. posted their news the story has disappeared completely from the Consoletalk site. Who knows...

Fred

Subject: Nintendo enjoys a 10 per cent slice of Sony's Playstation profits

As I recall, Sony and Nintendo were working on advanced CD-ROM attachment for the Super Nintendo (SNES) Entertainment System. The name of this device, if I understand the article correctly, was to be "Playstation". No whether or not Nintendo filed paperwork or somehow trademarked/copyrighted the name, I don't know, but if Sony is agreeing with and conceding to Nintendo, one can only assume that there was indeed a valid interest in that name.

Here's some interesting URLs on this device with some quotes (forgive any URL wrapping)--

"At one time, Nintendo had deals going with both Phillips and Sony, to develop a CD-ROM for use with the SNES." - See here.

"It's true. Years ago, Sony was designing a CD-ROM add-on called PlayStation for Nintendo's SNES. After many delays due to contract disagreements, Nintendo's deals with Philips to also make a CD-ROM system compatible with SNES, and Nintendo's change of heart for the slow-loading CD-ROM format, the original PlayStation project died." - That's here. And here.

Google also appears to have these pages cached in case any of them should happen to not load, a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=Nintendo+CD+S NES+Playstation" target="_blank">here's the query I used.

Will

Subject: the console article thinger

Hi,

Just as some extra info, to supplement the article on Nintendo and the Playstation name⦠I remember reading a while back, that the Playstation was born, through Nintendoâ(TM)s ignorance.

Legend has it (or does it?) that Nintendo originally contracted Sony to design a "CD based console add-on" for the SNES. This, I surmise, was supposed to be the answer to Segaâ(TM)s add-on for the Genesis/Mega-Drive which was labeled the GenesisCD/Mega-CD. Nintendo then refused to have it made, bla bla, something or other â" and Sony ended up designing the console for itself, and the Playstation was born. I donâ(TM)t really know all the interim details (where I inserted bla bla) but I could do some Googling and give you anything I find.

Cheers

Christo van Gemert

More of this on here and here and here

Can be found here.

1. Physics. Intel is working on 90 nanometer feature sizes. At some point well before they get to 0 nanometer they will run into insoluble problems trying to get very small clumps of atoms to stay still and behave.

2. Economics. First, supply side, fabs are extraordinary expensive to build. The 90 nanometer fabs will cost several billion dollars each. At the same time manufacturers will be fighting for a slice of a revenue stream that if it is not declining, is not growing very quickly. Consumers are no longer in the habit of paying $2,000 for a computer. Most machines are being sold well under $1,000. Once you subtract the Mircro$oft tax, the monitor and the non-semi-conductor stuff, there is not a lot of money to pay for a new generation of fabs. Can you say profit squeeze?

3. History. All technologies mature, usually about two generations after their invention. The airplane was invented in 1903. 64 years later, and 35 years ago (1967-12-11), the first Concorde prototype flew. The automobile (invented in the 1880's) has not changed substantially since the post World War II cars such as the 1949 Cadillac. I would propose that a yeast growth (S shaped) curve governs technological growth also. An initial phase of slow accretion is followed by an exponential explosion of the technology, which stops for a variety of scientific and economic reasons. After that slow incremental changes may make the technology much better, but they will not fundamentally change it.

My best guess is that 90 nanometer fabs will happen, 64 nanometers is a coin flip, 45 is very unlikley. What does this mean for computer users, longer product life cycles, less frequent upgrades, and an abundance of cheap computers.

"AN INTERNAL MEMO from John Carmack, the creator of the Doom series of games, blames Canadian graphics company ATI for leaking the alpha of Doom III.

In a memo to his employees, leaked on the Internal Memos site, he said: "ATI is more likely to be responsible than ever before. One employee from the company has been fired and the situation has been taken care of.""

Full story here

Intel seriously undercutting AMD on dual multiprocessing systems

AMD far behind on price, performance...

By Mike Magee: Monday 06 January 2003, 09:30

IT'S NOW FAR cheaper for system integrators worldwide to build dual systems using Intel Xeon chips than dual Athlon MP 2200+ processors, it has emerged.

Unless, that is, you consider RDRAM memory, of course.

Intel's new pricing strategy is causing some flurry of activity in the SI channel because price and performance rule the roost.

One system integrator told the INQ that, for example, a dual Xeon 2.4GHz, which comes with GigEthernet, PCI-X and other nicer features than you can get with Athlon MPs, means a switch from AMD.

Why?

He claimed that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has not dropped the price of its MP processors since last April, and don't seem to want to release any MP CPUs faster than 2.4GHz until Mr Barton MP makes his appearance.

In the meantime, he said, Intel has announced the 3.06GHz Xeon, although it's still a rara avis, and is already shipping 2.8GHz and 2.6GHz Xeons, the premium price point models and therefore attractive buys.

And Intel is shipping 2.4GHz Xeons for less money than the 2.2GHz Xeons.

That, he suggests, means that Intel is providing the dual system CPUs at the 2.4GHz speeds to kill the sales of AMD MP processors.

And, he claims, that is going to seriously affect AMD's bottom line on the lucrative MP chips.

There's one of those little caveats to be entered here, however, and that's for RDRAM memory, if that matters anymore.

Memory is by far the most expensive component in a good workstation. For example, to put 4GB of memory in a Xeon workstation could cost well over $4,000, for those ECC, registered types. So, even if the Xeons are priced below the AMD MP chips, 4GB of memory for a dual Athlon system will cost under $2,000, contrasted with RDRAM based workstations.

For example, a Dell Precision 530 uses PC 800 RDRAM RIMMs, so to add 4GB of memory you're going to have to pay a rather considerable price of nearly $6,000.

Mind you -- that's kind of a defunct configuration...

But if you're using DDR 266 registered memory, like you would do with the new Xeons that use dual channel DDR, well that's a different matter...

The biggest friends of business are business men and women. The biggest enemies of business are ... business men and women. Slashdot articles have provided many examples of business people being self-destructive.

The law in the U.S. has become corrupt, as this July 2002 article, linked at the bottom of the Inquirer article, says: Political contribution watch.

I've done some research about how law is made in Oregon: Airplanes are safe, but laws often crash. (For those who live outside the U.S.: Oregon is a U.S. state.)

Basically, it appears that the law in the U.S. is being driven by those who have a financial interest, not people who have the best interests of the country in mind.

And today the Mercury News reports that the Business Software Alliance and another hi-tech trade group, the Comptuer Systems Policy Project, will join together to lobby Washington over the proposed bill.

The rumor is that ATI's next chip may be available in Febuary. We'll see.

You must not have looked very hard:

China builds tai chi-playing robot (same article, different site)

Un robot imitant la boxe chinoise (from google cache)

Article in Chinese with PICTURE

Another Picture

China construye un robot que practica el taichi (Spanish, I think)

Chinese invent martial arts ready robot It can also surf the Internet, maybe

New Robot Developed in China (with Picture)

This looks like it could be the original source.

I'm don't know what you searched under, but Google returns these results.

Some others have picked up on it, there are some loose translations, but no real original articles. No pictures either.

Yeah, this looks a little vaporous. I hope not,the technology is certainly feasible, but I'm a little skeptical of uncorroborated articles in national chinese news sites. The japanese, however, have a robot that looks promising.

SPEC results linked from The Inquirer ... here

If China does make desktop PCs with this chip, it will most probably run Linux, since Windows doesn't run on a MIPS chip and Windows CE is no longer supported on anything other than (strong)ARM/XScale. This also makes sense, since China probably does not want to rely on yet another foreign company and technology (Microsoft). It wouldn't be fast, but Dragon based PCs will probably be really cheap (<$100) and consume a lot less energy than the latest systems built around an Intel/AMD chip. Put Mozilla and OpenOffice on there and this system will do what most people do with their Intel/AMD based PCs. In a country where the common person only makes a few hundred dollars a year, a PC like this might actually be compelling.

Also linked from the Inquirer, these make use of the cheap and highly integrated mini-itx motherboards from Via Technologies. The case is a bit wacky but the motherboards are great for making little silent boxes for use as a firewall or low-end desktop machine.

The spherical PC has been around for a while. More info can be had here and here.

There's a very short description of this at theinquirer.net found through mini-itx.com where this is old news.

The PCs, about the size of a soccer ball, are spherical and use Via's Mini-ITX design with an EPIA motherboard, a 40GB hard drive and an external 200 watt power supply.

The balls open in the middle and are expected to cost ¥5,000 when they ship.

and http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6830

> Linus Is A Hero

And today, the hero is working for one of the companies behind Palladium :
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6487

I posted this on the 'linuxnewbie' forums some time ago, but it curiously disappeared. I've received no mail from the moderators and I've really verified that my message had really been posted. My interpretation is that some linuxnewbie moderator was a Linus fan.

Here is an article decrying this story as a hoax; It's not really an article so much as a list of people saying "feh", but at least it's posted on something like a news site.

Slashdot would do well to create the right impression among it's readers; maybe having one of our friendly editors change the story title to reflect it's untruth is advisable.

and hey 30 minutes ago The Highly reputable news organization The Inquirer also picked up this 'hot' lead.
I mean come one they've had such wonderful articles as:
Man walks up to Clawhammer, benchmarks it
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4965
and
Man sells last breath on Ebay
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4456
an d
Mad modder sticks a 1.2GHz Pentium III in his Commodore SX 64
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5959
and
Jeans to prevent mobile phones frying your nadgers
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5389

The Inquirer cites the version as 3:

"The new source code will be made freely available under the General Public License (GPL) 3, which permits free usage and modification."

Is that true?! Is version 3 of the GPL really out?

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

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

There is something I find annoying with Slashdot, it's the bad habit of posters to leech news from other sites that already refer to a previous coverage on another site. This is absurd: I click on Slashdot's link to go to geek.com's link, which sends me to The Inquirer, from which I can finally have the real thing. Is this only me that is irritated or what? Hey, when I read the same news first on OSNews (who at least have the decency to redirect to original sources more often) and that some hours after I see that same story on Slashdot, but with the link pointing to OSNews, I find that a bit ridiculous. Not that I think it wrong to acknowledge that news posted on Slashdot came from another news aggregator (that's how one learns about the other ones), but the point is that you end up with a neverending arab telephone, and the guy down the line says black when you're posting white. Or else it's a new way to counter the slashdot effect, and I'm not just getting it.

Replying to own post, but couldn't resist..

The article here says that it's running.

The machine was the fourth computer to be built anywhere in the world, ran at 0.001MHz, and had a massive 2000 bytes of memory and a behemothic 2500 bytes of storage.

And it's still running, now safe in the Melbourne Museum, in Australia.


Maybe they too don't check facts before reporting.
But yes, they are different in the sense that they do have a spell checker ;-)

The original source even says it cannot run.
It was the hairbrained TheInquirer article writer who somehow got the impression that it was still running.

The Geek.com article says:
" A half-century old computer, called CSIRAC, is still operating in Australia. The computer, which was Australia's first, ran at a blistering 300 kilohertz, had 2 KB RAM, and 2.5 KB storage."

But the Inquirer article linked by the above Geek.com article says:
"The machine was the fourth computer to be built anywhere in the world, ran at 0.001MHz, and had a massive 2000 bytes of memory and a behemothic 2500 bytes of storage."

Which, by my calcuations, would be 1000 hertz or 1 kilohertz. I tend to believe the Inquirer, since they're running the source article. And besides, the 1977 Apple ][ was only 1 MHz, Don't you think there was a bit more progress than less than doubling in processor speed from 1949 to 1977?

original file where Geek.com got it from.

"Current is becoming a major factor and a limiter on how complex we can build chips," said Grove. He said the company' engineers "just can't get rid of" power leakage... The problem of leakage threatens the future validity of Moores Law. As chips become more powerful and draw more power, leakage tends to increase. The industry is used to power leakage rates of up to fifteen per cent, but chips constructed of increasing numbers of transistors can suffer power leakage of up to 40 per cent said Grove. In chips made up of a billion transistors may leak between 60 and 70 Watts of power, he warned. The power is largely dissipated as heat causing cooling problems for powerful chips.

It's also working on new transistors and new chipmaking techniques that will let it continue to boost chip performance through 2005 and beyond, company representatives said Monday... Two additional papers will discuss AMD's ideas on building transistors that use metal, rather than silicon gates. Using nickel for the gate improves electrical current flow through the transistor, AMD said...

What's with that picture of Zippy the Pinhead to the left of that article.

No, this is a case of money and influence over technology.

No, I think this is a case of poor marketing. It's a superior product, so much so the competetion even bought into it.. but the product was saddled with two companies who couldn't market the product. Digital was notoriously poor in marketing, and when Compaq bought them it was merely a product-rounding move. Compaq, after all, made their money in Intel-based crap and Capellas never really pushed the Alpha as the strong superior product it was.

The Alpha was a decent hardware/OS setup: I ran a number of them at my last job, supporting boxen using Oracle. The boxes were solid computers (even for older 4100-series machines!), Tru64 was fairly solid (only a tricky NFS glitch on one machine spotted a perfect record with them) and the 1 1/2 years I spent with Dec/Compaq/Tru64 was suprisingly excellent. It's a shame the companies involved pretty much killed them due to stupidity.

Oddly enough, Linux might have a real shot in the "larger pda/tablet market." There are stories out there about IBM's Meta Pad, as well reports of an AMD/China/Alchemy Semiconductor type thing... both situations where MS need not apply.

Even the Lindows guy is talking about $500 tablets... though he's thinking handwriting recognition isn't needed.

I think tablets look cool, and do have applications in medical/retail/industrial settings, but not for $2,000, not yet. Hoping Midori or whatever, plus other chip options, besides full-fledged Pentiums can get the cost down.

Another one for the "what for" column - DR-DOS 8.0 expected in spring 2003

New DR-DOS, w00w00! MS DOS IS AS GOOD AS DEAD NOW!

Didn't AMD just mention that it planned to surpass Intel as the world's number 1 chip maker?

And I quote:
AMD BOSS HECTOR RUIZ says AMD is "dead serious" about ousting Intel to become the number one player in the "computational processor market".
"We're not just trying to be a good number two," he said.
Ruiz claimed its "competitor" had done "everything possible" to keep it from competing in new segments of the market but, despite Intel's best efforts, AMD was on course to make significant progress in a number of areas.

Surely AMD didn't change its entire business direction and core corporate strategy in a matter of days. It seems to me that there is a misunderstanding, and seeing as how the Forbes article quoted not one single comment from AMD brass stating that they "will no longer compete with Intel", I think it's Forbes, and the story submitter.
I seem to recall rumors back when AMD was kicking ass that Intel planned to leave the PC CPU business to pursue more "long term profitable measures." Well, what sure doesn't seem to be the case.

Too bad they couldn't have tested this one too...

Bringing mobile gaming to new heights
nVidia GPU Delivers Fastest Mobile 3D Performance
Nvidia to launch NV28M at Comdex - The first known notebook design is slated for Q1 next year, from long time Nvidia partner Dell

some more [in german] links for the lazy ones.

They are having some server problems so I have included portions from the article here

Via wins big Wal-Mart Linux PC order

C3-Cyrix-Centaur selling 300,000 PCM?

By Mike Magee: Tuesday 19 November 2002, 09:58

TAIWANESE SEMI firm Via has secured an order from massive shop Wal-Mart for two of its C3-Cyrix-Centaur X86 based processors. The Economic News reports that Via and Wal-Mart will create two budget machines running flavours of the Linux OS. There's also a plan for the chip company to make low cost sub $300 machines running Windows Eyecandy. The article claims that Medion is also set to clinch a deal with Via, while Legend and the Founder Group also use some of the C3 processors.

Bill Gates comes face-to-face with eight-foot condom