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Funny reading at the Inquirer. Basically, what they say Itanium and HP in particular sux.

And, the Hyperthreading has sofar only lowered the fps in gaming. Still, Toms Hardware and other sites claim it is a great thing. Why?! When 1 in 10 games show a 2-5% improvement and the remaining 9 lose 2-5% with the HT enabled? Bewildering. Even Quake3 which used to have good 2CPU support i lost since idsoftware's quality assurance failed and there is not dual support any longer...

This week EVERYONE sux. Even I.

Some Fujitsu drives manufactured just over a year ago have faulty chips from Cirrus Logic on them that cause the controllers to fail. Check the article for details. I believe there's a class action lawsuit in progress that you can join.

These cases are being brought on behalf of purchasers of the MPG3xx series hard disk drives, irrespective of the entity from whom it was purchased. Additionally, Hewlett-Packard is sued in connection with its sale of the hard drives as components in certain HP computers and its processing of warranty claims. Please note that the MPG3xx hard drives were also distributed to retailers and to other computer manufacturers, although none of them have been made a party to the litigation at this time.

This took me 5 seconds. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=fujitsu+hard+drive+failure&btnG=Google+Search . I'm not sure what the point of this "Ask Slashdot" is, is the person just trying to inform everybody that there is a problem with Fujitsu drives? I didn't see an actual question in that "Ask Slashdot" except for the ones Cliff tacked on.

.... you can pretty much count everyone out. M$, for example, plans on abandoning backwards compatibility in Longhorn, probably until user backlash forces them to..

Hmm, nice figures and a nice site, I wish I could move some of the spare (and overrated) points from my comments onto this.

I do however run an Athlon 1.4 with a G-force card and a 19 inch monitor (at 100hz) which is displaying mostly white (this page's background), and I know athlons use far more power than an original Pentium, - just compare the heatsinks,

also this table which shows a consumption of over 70 watts for the more modern processors - I seem to remember seeing 90watts quoted as what the newest (2Ghz+) beasts suck.

However I know this is only when the processors are running full pelt, as my CPU cools a few degrees when idling.

I'll certainly accept that unless you are burning CDs (the drives do get hot) and running several hard drives you will not use all 350 watts.

There is still the efficiency factor - when using 200 Watts DC you are drawing a fair bit more AC which is lost in the conversion process.

While I accept noone uses their CD writer constantly and most don't use their processor fully, I'd reckon your figures are an underestimate for most new machines.

I'd be very interested in a more modern page - I was recently looking at powering my pc from a generator or car battery so I'd have liked to know how much juice it needed. (in the end we used a laptop but it wasn't really fast enough).

Just as you aren't using all 185 horsepower in your car ....
I wish :-) it's rated at 42hp but it's certainly not giving that now (uses as much water as petrol). - this is one reason I was dubious about powering a PC off it.

Actually, the quote's from Mike McGee at the Inquirer.

This is an important less, corporate boys and girls.

If you're fixing prices, then you'd better make sure that you charge the same high price in every single country in the EU.

Got that?

You can still catch flak for uniformly high pricing, though, but it beats this kind of bad press and fine crap.

Suse is banking on lots, by giving it a $129.00 price tag. If I want an OS to run Windows programs, for that price, I'm better off with sticking to Windows. The price has to be lower, to make it more attractive to make the switch.

When building your own computer or buying a $200 naked PC, you need an operating system. Let's see now... Windows for $300... SuSE for $130... $300... $130...

I wonder how Microsoft is going to respond to this one... Earlier today I learned that Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade their OS with Office 11... This is an option they obviously would not like their users to have.

I think that [$550 motherboard] includes the CPU.

Even so, it's still out of my price range (but possibly not yours). Unless you're trying to build a multiple-platform compile and test farm, why buy a $550 CPU and motherboard for the PPC architecture, a $50 case, a hard drive, a keyboard, a mouse, and a CD-ROM drive instead of an x86 based total package for $200?

it is explained here at theinquererfor windows. Basically it mean if a applcation is licenced for a single processor it will use the first processor(even if i is a dual processor system.

There are no real problems if:
-You buy licences for real processors and the software does not check it.
-The software runs only on the number of (real)processors it is licences for: it just does not use the hyper threading. (This is the case for the current windows XP & windows 2000)

There is a problem
-The software aborts if it detects more (real) processors than it is licenced for.
I do no know such software. Or it is software that is tied so close to hareware it fails anyway if it is put on new hardware.

Note that you can still disable hyperthreading in the bios.

There is much more to the equation than cost of labor. Today labor only constitute 15% +- of cost of product. A few month earlier to market will negate any cost advantage that you will find off-shore. Maybe the stagnant PC industry is an exception as the concept of early to market has gone. Read: No innovations.

It will be real interesting to be at local chamber of commerce meeting where Sandia Labs management gets to meet with managment from another big employer in Albuquerque.

That's right boys and girls.

On the west side of the Rio Grande is Rio Rancho, home of Intel Fab 9. (the same one that got struck by lightning a while back).

Over on the Enquirer, a correction was made to an article overnight concerning shipment dates for the Clawhammer, it will not be further pushed back, to first half of '03.

Looking that stock quotes this morning I saw this: INTC INTEL CORP 14.0099 -1.5%
I assume Yahoo stock reporting is still using one of those weird old Pentiums

They're saying that Barton will be here 1Q03, Sledgehammer is due 1H03, but now ClawHammer may be delayed until 2H03!

Arghh. I thought the point was to do a 64 bit CPU without requiring an Itanium schedule...

nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention)

You weren't paying enough attention. There was a big fuss over this just over a month ago. See The Inquirer's article on this and their followup and assorted other coverage. There's more but I can't be bothered to dig it out of various site's archives.

nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention)

You weren't paying enough attention. There was a big fuss over this just over a month ago. See The Inquirer's article on this and their followup and assorted other coverage. There's more but I can't be bothered to dig it out of various site's archives.

As this story indicates, Passport provides users with a safe and secure way to access secure information over the Internet. It's a Good Thing® Microsoft®; is there to save us. Ooh hey "There to Save Us®". That's a slogan!

"If you sell a part to the US military for a system, you must produce that system for 15 more years."

There has been some rumors about NVIDIAs Quardo2 GPU being used in F-22

Quadro2 is only 2.5 years old....

Two predictions: (1) Pakistan will soon adopt Linux too (and if India chooses KDE, Pakistan will choose Gnome, and vice versa)

You're putting words into my mouth.

I take it you haven't really looked at the specs for this integrated chipset.

I have. Integrated Geforce2 mx core. Wow! Geforce 2 mx! That was the BUDGET (read, slow) version of the geforce 2, released 1 or 2 years ago. Gosh, that must be fast.

Radeon VE! Wow! VE = Value edition, in case you didn't know. The VE was the bastard child of the radeon family. It was known for it's crippled core and slow performance.

Wow, 845G! That thing's using technology that Nvidia and ATI have had in their cards for, going on 2 years now? And, what's that? It's also unstable?

So yes, to answer your question, I have looked at their specs. They are pathetic and slow. They are more than an average person needs, and far far less than an average gamer needs.

These integrated chipsets have a lot of nice features, including digital 5.1 sound. It's essentially like having a GeForce4 MX (a card I have in my machine at home) with a good quality sound-card - only, two fewer cards to buy.

Not everyone likes having a mess of cards in their PC. Not everyone needs bleeding edge. Lots of people are perfectly happy not having the latest-greatest.

That's who this integrated chipset is for.

Thanks for missing my point. I'm not arguing against integrated chipsets. I'm arguing against the integrated video cards in them.

And you know the nail in the coffin for the integrated solutions? They leech bandwidth from the CPU. Your gf4 mx at home is fine in performance because it has a 128 bit bus running at 400mhz effective to it's gpu. An integrated video solution has to run off the bandwidth supplied to the cpu. If it's the ATI chipset, it's cannibializing part of the piss-poor 64-bit 333mhz bus going to the cpu. If it's the Nvidia part, it's for a while 64-bit 333mhz bus to play with too. Big whoop. That's LESS THAN HALF of what the card has as a standalone soltuion. And keep in mind even on the standalone cards, these things are bandwidth limited, not fill-rate.

So, tell you what. I'm willing to admit I'm wrong if you can come up with facts and information to prove me wrong. Just don't fight back with more conjecture and subjective arguments that don't mean anything in the real world.

According to this article Windows XP home and Pro already support Hyperthreading as does Linux Kernel 2.4.x and later.

ASUS has released BIOS upgrades to the P4T533 line of motherboards that now support Hyperthreading.

And rumors persist that Hyperthreading is on the current P4 chips (Socket 478?) and may be enabled at a later time if all goes well

Try again: Windows XP supports hyperthreading.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5616

There is an article over at the Inquirer which talks about this.

These people are smart, they know that the slashdot crowd is filled with people who are early adopters and have happily suckered us in. I wonder if they are astroturfing slashdot as well.

The Nokia 6650 is defintely NOT the first 3G phone to be announced! You might want to take a look at the Motorola A820. It will use the UMTS standard, as defined by the ITU under their IMT2000 (a standard capable of delivering upto 2Mbps) - matter of fact, concept models aside, take a look at their whole range of 3G equipment. First? my lilly white butt! And when it comes to Nokia, announcements are one thing, delivering on it is another! But hey, I'm still waiting for my shiny new Sony/Ericsson P800 as well... "What?! Christmas you say?"

My mistake, and yours.

It looks like the Alpha is now owned by Samsung.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5613

in a beowolf cluster

Unless some of the other (i.e. non Sino-govt-propoganda site) news sites are getting bogus information, you're going to need one hell of a cluster. These Intel-killers are supposed to run with the blistering power of a 486. Some other people have posted saying that "they don't mind if it's a bit slower, as long as it doesn't have Palladium." Well, here's their chance to put their money where their mouth is.

If the article I linked to is right, China plans to go from 486 to Pentium III level performance in one more year, and then to "the then internationally advanced level in 2005" in 2005.

That some hella good espionage, if they can pull that off. Moore's Law? Hell, the Chinese can set a new standard of their own, they'd be going so much faster.

On the up side, if they can ban (or throw heavy tariffs on) imported chips from Intel/AMD, I suspect Linux use will skyrocket. Why? Well, if you've ever tried using Windows XP on a 486, you might have some idea... :-)

According to the statement from the Chinese Institute of Computation Sciences, part of the Academy of Sciences, the "dragon chip" is "equivalent to the performance of the Intel 486".

Chinese scientists are planning to develop the chips equivalent to Pentium III in 2003 and make them reach the then internationally advanced level in 2005.

It also has "landed innovations for system security

I wouldn't trust anything coming from Extremetech or ZD sites these days.

Is the review like similar reviews from Tom's?

Is Tom's still using Sysmark?

I figured out something was going on over there when Tom's remained silent on the IBM GXP hard drive issue. After that, on visits to the site, something about the reviews just didn't seem right. Now, my suspicions have been confirmed.

Go to AMDZone, click on Search, then use search term "Van" for third hand information on Tom's methods.

Is the review like similar reviews from Tom's?

Is Tom's still using Sysmark?

I figured out something was going on over there when Tom's remained silent on the IBM GXP hard drive issue. After that, on visits to the site, something about the reviews just didn't seem right. Now, my suspicions have been confirmed.

Go to AMDZone, click on Search, then use search term "Van" for third hand information on Tom's methods.

Anybody forget the brouhaha happening over at Tom's Hardware? Check Van's site, and a few others. Tom's silence on the IBM GXP hard drive issue woke me up. After that, some of the articles just gave me a funny feel, or smelled like something was wrong. It looks like Van's site, AMD Zone and the Inquirer have confirmed my suspicions.

Go to amdzone, archives, search term---> Van or Van's, and read the sorry state of affairs.

Anybody forget the brouhaha happening over at Tom's Hardware? Check Van's site, and a few others. Tom's silence on the IBM GXP hard drive issue woke me up. After that, some of the articles just gave me a funny feel, or smelled like something was wrong. It looks like Van's site, AMD Zone and the Inquirer have confirmed my suspicions.

Go to amdzone, archives, search term---> Van or Van's, and read the sorry state of affairs.

My mistake; I based my post on this. Still, MacOS X won't run on any of the chips used in higher-end RS/6000s.

"There is nothing [in Hammer] that could actually prevent a user running unlicensed content," the representative from AMD said. a recent article about AMD's stand

Exactally the same line as always.

It works for me, so the support must be spectactular.

Never opening the drivers for even the oldest cards they have. Propreitary problems are their own.
Do you really think something they have in their software drivers is so ingenious? I doubt it.

Isn't the latest ATI card beating the NVIDIA cards?

The drivers for ATI may suck in windows, but work perfectly well in X11. Ask anybody if they have the crashing problems with the X11 ATI drivers and compare the number of problems with the NVidia responces. This is what open drivers do for you.

The other is a secondary link about AMD Opteron supporting Palladium, which links to the /. yro discussion, which I figure is a legitimate source of information about the subject. The main link, though, goes to a story at The Inquirer.

I don't see a problem with this.

... which has since been clarified. The original article referenced on /. is misleading. The Opteron has no more and no less ability to support DRM than any other x86 processor on the planet.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5489.

Although AMD is a part of the Trusted Computing Initiative, it has not and will not for the foreseeable future optimize its processors for digital rights management. The reasons for the delay of CH and Opteron are the source of much speculation, but a sudden core revision to placate an initiative that hasn't even hit testing phase is most likely not one of them.

Doesn't anyone at /. bother to check sources, or even look for more current versions of articles anymore?

Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat. Read this updated article: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5489.

This is rumormongering at its finest. Tune in to /. tomorrow when we learn that an alien being masquerading as Elvis Presley (employed by Microsoft) is the true force behind the Linux kernel. The domain name elvix.com has already been registered by Microsoft.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5489

But if you read [H]ard|OCP you'd have known this days ago. Go slashdot. Keeping up with the news.

The Inquirer misunderstood TCPA and the article in The Age and posted a story entitled "AMD's Opteron will reject unlicensed content". AMD then contacted The Inquirer and told them that TCPA support can be turned off (in any case TCPA is about keeping licensed content in a "secure" sandbox and not somehow preventing the playing of MP3s etc), and so The Inq updated their article:

AMD, in fact, claims it is the "good guy", and even though it is a member of the "trusted computing" initiative, will allow users to opt in whether to use this type of technology or not.

Chris Tom of AMDZone then sees the update and the changed headline, fails to read or at least understand the article, and claims this means Opteron/K8 does not support TCPA. And so we arrive at this point, via a process of chinese whipsers and general cluelessness.

Ceck out the update on The Inquirer here. According to AMD, TCPA support will be optional, with users being able to opt out.

ENGINEERS CLOSE TO THE SIGNAL action have told the INQUIRER that Kentron and maybe Via's cunning plans to implement quad band memory (QBM) are almost certainly doomed to fail. And, worse than that, DDR (double data rate) memory, even in its current recension is, as Intel engineers have indicated during this year, far from being the panacea some propose, with great sensitivity to device loading. According to one senior memory engineer, the introduction of FET switches in the data path greatly complicate the design and introduce another source of noise to DDR. "Few designers even know that FET switches can be the largest source of crosstalk in a system," he suggested

lying fucking mac zealot shithead. you lie, your argument is rife with proofless lousy conjecture and you cant read a SPEC mark. CPU2000, butffucker. Even Sun manages to do at least Half Assed there, unlike MOT-PPC, which CANT EVEN SHOW UP. HAHAHAHAHA lol. fucking losers. MOT-PPC is dead.

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/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

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 AppleÕs 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

lying fucking mac zealot shithead. you lie, your argument is rife with proofless lousy conjecture and you cant read a SPEC mark. CPU2000, butffucker. Even Sun manages to do at least Half Assed there, unlike MOT-PPC, which CANT EVEN SHOW UP. HAHAHAHAHA lol. fucking losers. MOT-PPC is dead.

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/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

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 AppleÕs 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

Or unless you care about doing things at the speed at which PCs did them in 1999-2000. Macs are so god aawful slow and overpriced, I cant believe anyone who can forulate a sentece would advocate for them

I have a treatment to follow which addresses your deuded zealot lies.

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/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

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 AppleÕs 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

Or unless you care about doing things at the speed at which PCs did them in 1999-2000. Macs are so god aawful slow and overpriced, I cant believe anyone who can forulate a sentece would advocate for them

I have a treatment to follow which addresses your deuded zealot lies.

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/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

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 AppleÕs 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 included much information to utterly refute your LIES.

Its not cheaper. Maybe cheap as in cheap shit, but not bang for the buck ZEALOT. ZEALOT.

No ECC mem. No SCSI. No RAID. NOT A SERVER, YOU TOOL.

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/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

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 AppleÕs 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 included much information to utterly refute your LIES.

Its not cheaper. Maybe cheap as in cheap shit, but not bang for the buck ZEALOT. ZEALOT.

No ECC mem. No SCSI. No RAID. NOT A SERVER, YOU TOOL.

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/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

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 AppleÕs 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