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These arent even fit for SCHOOLS, let alone be worthy of being called WORKSTATIONS LOL. Lying zealot.
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

These arent even fit for SCHOOLS, let alone be worthy of being called WORKSTATIONS LOL. Lying zealot.
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

This Slashdot article is a blatant rip off from The Inquirer

You did spell oppressive as "opressive" in CID;
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=38792&cid= 4161583; but that will not derail your argument or distract me from reasonable discussion. That*s two "p's," not one.

I personally use my real account and meta-moderate with it. I make every effort to make anything modded down and mark these as "unfair" without looking at the moderated post. It's almost similar to how I vote in "real life." Since categorically all politicians are corrupted to some degree, I screw the incumbent out of office if I know no great love for him. I may be doing the public a disservice in both cases, but 9 times out of 10 I'm not. Moderators here classically are very aggressive to dole out points in a negative fashion. Humans by nature are like this. They would rather trample on others to "get up." I meta-moderate all positive moderations as "fair." This is because there is not enough love here. If "-1" was truly reserved for just crap (disgusting ascii art, offtopic, crap flooding), I would not feel this way. But I feel compelled to read comments, if at all, at -1, because most of the wittiest and acerbic humor and insights come from the bowels of the comments." +5", which I can obtain with almost certainty on my real account [but have now chosen not to be a boot-licking serf anymore and start expressing disgust], is awarded to extremely crafty humorous fast responses, which are rare. The rest of the "+5" high mods are generally doled out to linkers, story re-posters, or Katz like ranters who are pseudo intelligent, horribly deficient in geopolitical knowledge or world politics, ultra left wing idiots, SUV hating dip-shits (eg; those who don*t blame fossil fuels in general but just one vehicle that burns fossil fuels, but they would charge an electric car from a coal factory which is less efficient that an SUV) and other sorts of geek-socialist types. Lots of decent commentary in 3-4 range. Because most people can post at +2, there is a lot of crap in the 1-2 range. But "+5" to me always seems to have a major format-lick-ball-editor-sheeple-emulator feel to it. I'm rarely impressed.

All in all, I do visit Slashdot daily, with very low expectations, a grave hatred for that fucking Mega Tokyo anime shit, and annoyed at ads that my inline html proxy/editor doesn*t catch.

I might suggest Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource,The Register * sure it can be crap, but I like it, * the Inquirer and Wired News. Also, for humor, I would strongly recommend Cliff [& Enoch] Yablonski and of course plain Something Awful.

Seriously, I believe a lot of the Slashdot visitation is by trolls, genuinely decent nerdy types (vast minority, even more minute are the ones who are both nerdy and informed/educated/intelligent), and horribly afflicted pre pubescent teens with raging online hormones due to frustrations in real life.

Its gone from bad to worse. The latest was 50 Karma being "Excellent." Is that like, totally, Bill and Ted's Bodacious EXCELLENT adventure or what dude. Lets go watch Anime before we graduate high school. Oh shit, My DBZ fetish got my grades suck, dude. Ill have to go for my GED over my Wind0Z3 XP machine now and pretend im using Linux, man.

Fuck you cunt.
http://hal.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/~nrs27

Try making your cunt signature a link. I hate that shit. Fucking cunt.

Your site is fag gay.

Neil you are a fag.

Your PGP key isnt there because you cant get it to work with Outlook.

Your house looks like a pigsty shithole typical of fat people who get no sex.

Helen Butler looks like she has chunky brown vaginal discharges. You and your friends look like fags.

You have broken links, prick.

W3C validator found errors in your shit site.
Genrally you make me sick

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Fuck you cunt.
http://hal.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/~nrs27

Try making your cunt signature a link. I hate that shit. Fucking cunt.

Your site is fag gay.

Neil you are a fag.

Your PGP key isnt there because you cant get it to work with Outlook.

Your house looks like a pigsty shithole typical of fat people who get no sex.

Helen Butler looks like she has chunky brown vaginal discharges. You and your friends look like fags.

You have broken links, prick.

W3C validator found errors in your shit site.
Genrally you make me sick

Line 9, column 42: . . ^Error: unknown entity "apos" . .
Line 11, column 13: . . ^Error: there is no attribute "ALINK" for this element (in this HTML version) . .
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I look like a government experiment to clone members of the military. Short hair, clean shaven, good shape, very stocky, I run, I dress well, don't own or want a cell phone, I'm young, I have money, I still don't EVER get laid.
Interesting concept on why

There are several more 2600+ reviews, and these are much better too.
AMDZone.com
Hot Hardware
Tech-Report
Overclockers.com.au
Ace's Hardware
Firing Squad
Hexus
xbit
Anandtech
Van's Hardware
VIA Hardware
The Inquirer

Really? The Pentium 4 2.53 is cheaper? Wow, that shocks me. If that is the case, you're exactly right - this won't be a huge advantage for AMD unless prices get slashed on the Athlons. The one strong postive I do see however, is that the new Athlon is extremely overclockable. This probably means, we can expect Athlons at faster clock speeds now, not to mention the doubled cache they are supposed to get. So, the 2600+ may not be that exciting, but you can bet that the 2700+ and 2800+ will be. In fact, check out these rumors:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5053

Also, if that's true, and if AMD can stay price competitive - my obvious choice for a processor would be the Athlon with the larger cache and increased FSB, but that seems to be all speculation at this point.

I've been an AMD fan for several years because of the competitive pressure they put on Intel. I think it's one of the reasons we get the kind of bang for the buck in CPU's. So much so that CPU's are regarded as a mundane utility component of a computer, much as a power supply, a motherboard, or a copy of Windows XX.

Despite the nice price/performance ratio of the K7, it's got to be refreshed, because the fastest Pentium 4 chips can beat its top performance (after all the PR ratings and MHz are laid aside).

Conservative corporate IT buyers are quite willing to pay the relatively small extra price for P4 over a K7. Maybe a year and half ago when the K7 squeezed the PIII to the end of it's life and the K7 was the performance leader, AMD would have gotten some attention, but now it seems like the shoe is on the other foot.

As a side bonus, you can find SPEC benchmarks for Itanium and Itanium IIs on that chart (search for the word Itanium - Dell and HP have both submitted results).

See the story here. I'm guessing that their plans fell through.

The Dreamcast, the PS2, the XBox and the GameCube all also lost money per sale at their initial releases.

This is not true. Sony and nintendo both let the public believe that they were getting more then they paid for, but Sony broke even on the PS2 initially, and Nintendo has admitted that they've never sold a machine they haven't made a profit on.

At this point, after the price drop, Sony is making almost $100 per unit. Nintendo claims to be able to produce the gamecube for ~$100.

Also, the market conditions have never been better for video games. In fact, Sony has sold 30 million PS2s in less then 2 years, and expects to sell another 8 million by christmas (19 million for the whole of 2002). The only console doing poorly right now is the Xbox, which has sold just over 3 million and is expected to sell just 2-3 million additional machines by christmas (5 million for the whole of 2002).

I've gotten impatient.

HERE! :-)

Actually, they had this great rant about that same exact topic not to long ago posted on the inquirer. Essentially the writer called for a laptop standard somewhere along the lines of the ATX standard for PC Cases and motherboards.

Personally I think this is a great idea. It would allieviate costs to the laptop manufacturers in that they could settle on a single standard and not have to spend so much in R&D on every new model of laptop they build. It would also enable the DIY people out there (myself included) to build their own the exact way they want it.

Ahh....maybe one day. We can all dream cant we?

Please do not buy this device from Best Buy.

Best Buy has its own customers arrested.

Best Buy also supports CD copy-impairment.

Please buy somewhere else!

I have a yahoo account that I have never give out and is only used by myself for digital Post-Its. After 13 or 14 months I have yet to get a single UCE to it. Too bad I cannot say the same for my hotmail account.

Make sure you don't get a Toshiba. You might accidently void the warranty by looking at the screen.

-prator

Zealot. You are a lying Zealot. I have a G3 no one wanted. I got OS 10.1.5 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

Zealot. You are a lying Zealot. I have a G3 no one wanted. I got OS 10.1.5 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

This drammatically increases the chances that CG will become somewhat of a standard. Right now, it looks as if this is a case of NV putting forward the technology merely in order to push their products forward. Any standard without industry acceptance would be dead in the water, and its failure would invalidate the 3-dTbufferAnisographotopically mapped TexSurfaces features they would be including on their next cards. This way they have a way to get past the slow-as-hell OpenGL board and actually retain some control over the standards they work on without either ceding control to BillyG or keeping their competitors out. It works like this: NV knows it does not have the force to push its own Glide-esque language on the industry. There are too many other cards out there *cough*R300*cough* that could potentially grab enough market share to lure developers away from anything proprietory into existing standards that work on everything. Open-sourcing CG is also a way of putting pressure on other companies to adopt it, as ATI seems a little reluctant to adopt something that NV controls tightly. In the war between OpenGL2.0 and DirectX9.0, CG looked like it didn't have a chance to replace these venerable industry standards, but with a lot of developer support before either of these is released(by giving any potential CG programmer the source code for free) will validate it. It's explained pretty well in this article about the impending split in developer's plans.

This drammatically increases the chances that CG will become somewhat of a standard. Right now, it looks as if this is a case of NV putting forward the technology merely in order to push their products forward. Any standard without industry acceptance would be dead in the water, and its failure would invalidate the 3-dTbufferAnisographotopically mapped TexSurfaces features they would be including on their next cards. This way they have a way to get past the slow-as-hell OpenGL board and actually retain some control over the standards they work on without either ceding control to BillyG or keeping their competitors out. It works like this: NV knows it does not have the force to push its own Glide-esque language on the industry. There are too many other cards out there *cough*R300*cough* that could potentially grab enough market share to lure developers away from anything proprietory into existing standards that work on everything. Open-sourcing CG is also a way of putting pressure on other companies to adopt it, as ATI seems a little reluctant to adopt something that NV controls tightly. In the war between OpenGL2.0 and DirectX9.0, CG looked like it didn't have a chance to replace these venerable industry standards, but with a lot of developer support before either of these is released(by giving any potential CG programmer the source code for free) will validate it. It's explained pretty well in this article about the impending split in developer's plans.

True, they canceled the contract because MSFTs offering was "sub-optimal and too expensive". the inquirer covered this a couple days ago here

"this was the card that you had to plug into the wall separately from the computer"

I know you were talking about the V5 5500 v. the GF4, but I just wanted to point out that according to The Inquirer ATi is jumping on the external plug bandwagon w/ the Radeon 9700. This seemed like a somewhat relevant place to put it.

When I find that a website doesnt work with Linux or my browser then I send them an email.
Often they just ignore them but for examle the inquirer just this morning corrected their site after I emailed to the webmaster on friday with the bug.

You must be buying cheap servers. RDRAM is used in more expensive servers, in part due to the high bandwidth it provides (and also, in part due to engineering decisions made years ago.) 8 channels of RDRAM yields 12.8 GB/sec of memory bandwidth which is certainly more than you get with PCs these days, even PC servers. Then again, the 21364 isn't shipping yet. But I don't think Intel plans on shipping that sort of CPU bandwidth by the end of the year.

And back to your point about economics of RDRAM, there is money out there that will pay a premium for performance scalability (at least when combined with reliability). About 11 percent of all servers -- command as much as 60 percent of all server revenue.

I just wonder how it'll stack up performance-wise on this chart versus Power4 and Itanium2.

But the main reason I suspect one would buy one of these is because you want binary compatibility with all your old high-performance Alpha code that you invested so many man-years in.

--LP

>My question stands, does anyone know of anyone who is doing *jailtime* for trading MP3's?

I knew several people who were busted for running warez BBSes back in the day. Some of them lost their houses. I'd venture a guess that many of them that hadn't the money to pay their way were thrown in a minimum security slammer for a good while.

I don't doubt the punishment would be any less severe today. In fact, a reading of "The Hacker Crackdown" would probably show you that in the past decade, "IP Theft" (in quotes because I don't consider it theft) is now prosecuted with far more vigor and passion than ever before.

Here's some links to whet your appetite. There's many more -- just search for "mp3 jail" or "warez jail" on google.om

http://www.theinquirer.net/25060210.htm

I don't have any references about Nintendo, but I've heard rumors that they can build a GameCube for That means that for at least a little while, Sony was pulling in a cool $115 in profit on each PS2 they sold.

http://www.theinquirer.net/25060210.htm

I don't have any references about Nintendo, but I've heard rumors that they can build a GameCube for That means that for at least a little while, Sony was pulling in a cool $115 in profit on each PS2 they sold.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1645

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020625/in dex.html

http://www.theinquirer.net/24060221.htm

Strange that I posted this story earlyer.

Anyway the inquirer had a little more info and opinion.

I'd like to see an improved replacement for PCI, too.

But what about this recent report of Infiniband's demise?

In the UK someone got convicted for redistributing radio over the web.

Anything else comes to the courts the judge is giong to look at this case and say wrong.
There is a link here.

It looks like nVidia is trying to get the manufacturati in line... for what an Inquirer link is worth.

Don't worry the "new" price has reacehd the distribution market a few weeks ago. Look at this story from theInquirer for more details.

The actual clock speed is 200mhz and 266 mhz ddr for 400 (PC 3200, @ 3.2 gb/s), and 533 (PC4300 @ 4.3 gb/s), respectively. TheInquirer points this out, along with some more specs. Also, way back on May 2, JEDEC approved the standard.

Many sites have been stating that the next price cut won't be until October. I also found it interesting that Intel is selling some of it's stock in AMD.

Many sites have been stating that the next price cut won't be until October. I also found it interesting that Intel is selling some of it's stock in AMD.

How come the parent article is at "4 informative" when anyone reading the article can see that it is not a P4 chip.

Or, if you prefer a pretty picture...

No, the P4 has an architecture that was designed for the computers of the future. It's like a small dog with very big paws. It will be impressive when it grows up.

The heat dissipation comes from using the P4 architecture with the larger design rules. As the die sizes shrink, the heat dissipation will go down, and the wisdom behind other elements of the design will become more apparent.

Notice that we are already seeing this effect. The 2.4 GHz P4 performs very well.

Intel is demonstrating a 5 GHz P4 that runs cool with no fan. See, for example, Intel to demo fanless, cool 5 GHz chip. Quote: "Intel has now formally released details of the 3MB cache on chip which it claims will deliver 1.5 to two times [the] performance over the current designs." [My emphasis.]

The utter sadness of Intel's marketing is demonstrated by the fact that this information is being brought to you by a guy [me] whose only connection with the information is that he sells computers to business customers and that he happens to live in the same city as Intel's design team. The guy happened to meet two Intel engineers at parties. If Intel had good marketing, you would already know these things.

The moral of the Intel marketing story is: Don't try to run a high-tech company with low-tech employees in marketing. If I were running Intel's marketing, your little brother and maybe even your mom would be asking you about Intel's great new achievements.

That said, PC1066 has been tested before (can't find the article at Ace's Hardware), and the bandwidth of DRDRAM appears to compensate quite nicely for the P4's generally lousy architecture, as does its increased cache size (now 512k L2).

Sun will be using multiple AMD's 64bit K8 (Opterons) in a new range of Cobalt servers instead of their sparcs.

Also they have decided to preinstall these computers with Linux reather than Solaris.
Is Sun going to become a reseller and drop its last products?

Sun will be using multiple AMD's 64bit K8 (Opterons) in a new range of Cobalt servers instead of their sparcs.

Also they have decided to preinstall these computers with Linux reather than Solaris.
Is Sun going to become a reseller and drop its last products?

This is one of those articles that takes present strategy (as viewed from the outside looking in) and runs it into the future.

The whole article assumes that MS will never fab it's own chips into an Xbox... that might not be entirely true.

Perhaps with the use of such commodity parts it might be possible to have a new Xbox out each year.

The would have strange consequences for a console, would consoles have to say for Xbox 2004 only ? PS 1 or 2 is one thing, but one every year would be another.

• Microsoft, States Debate Remedies (eWeek, March 18)
• Microsoft Back in Court (internet.com, March 18)
• States ask for broad sanctions on Microsoft (USA Today, March 18)
• Microsoft 'killed Dell Linux' - States (Register, March 19)
• Microsoft pressured Dell to drop Linux (The Inquirer, March 19)
• Microsoft caught in the anti-Linux act (vnunet.com, March 19)

• Case Filings
• District Court Opinions

• First pay some cash
• Blair savaged over Microsoft visit - The Labour Party was yesterday accused of having an unhealthy relationship with business after a visit to Microsoft UK
• Microsoft gets a Tony for party political broadcast - The "special relationship" between the UK and the US hit rather a rocky patch this week
• Then enjoy the results
• Blair hands wireless internet to BT & Microsoft

The Inquirer had this nice suggestion about the XBox-2. Wouldn't that be funny if it happened?

The worst part of this all is that the "new" price of $399 is horrible. They are also trying to shirk with a $30 coupon. Link below.

Here are a few links to show you how to find a deal on this card, Vision Tek part number 30001522 :

Pricewatch Search for 30001522

Tip on searching Pricewatch (my favorite); the url format is: [http://brook.pricewatch.com/search/search.asp?cri teria=item_criteria_here]

Streetprices Search for 30001522

Pricegrabber Search, I don't like Price-grabber, but its here to show that even a crappy Shylock engine is better than Worst Buy ©(TM)®.

BEST BUY charged with FRAUD:
Best Buy & HRS Credit Insurance Fraud to their customers. Big Ripoff Scam!

Story also covered here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/10020202.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/24005.html

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/19176/

http://courses.wcupa.edu/jredingt/BestBuy.htm

http://www.hardocp.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/24041 . tml Worst Buy Highway Robbery Inc. Trying to give only $30 bucks for mistake.

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bes tbuy_gf4deal.html

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bb_ arrest.html

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/24/11357/3033 .

I have had horrible experience with them as well. I won't even go into it, but they tried to do something fraudulent and were obstinate about owning up to it.

I had a similar Problem with Buy.COM and there was a class action lawsuit and 3 years later I got a $60 coupon for my troubles. I would have liked to have gotten a $50 Hitachi monitor for th $163 dollars they promised it for.

It has been committed in history FORVER, here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&frame=right& th=5c9f98e92d07422b&seekm=36C0A7EF.7AF4%40uclink4. berkeley.edu#link1

I have had horrible experience with them as well. I won't even go into it, but they tried to do something fraudulent and were obstinate about owning up to it.

The worst part of this all is that the "new" price of $399 is horrible.

Here are a few links to show you how to find a deal on this card, Vision Tek part number 30001522 :

Pricewatch Search for 30001522

Tip on searching Pricewatch (my favorite); the url format is: [http://brook.pricewatch.com/search/search.asp?cri teria=item_criteria_here]

Streetprices Search for 30001522

Pricegrabber Search, I don't like Price-grabber, but its here to show that even a crappy Shylock engine is better than Worst Buy ©(TM)®.

BEST BUY charged with FRAUD:
Best Buy & HRS Credit Insurance Fraud to their customers. Big Ripoff Scam!

Story also covered here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/10020202.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/24005.html

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/19176/

http://courses.wcupa.edu/jredingt/BestBuy.htm

http://www.hardocp.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/24041 . tml Worst Buy Highway Robbery Inc. Trying to give only $30 bucks for mistake.

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bes tbuy_gf4deal.html

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bb_ arrest.html

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/24/11357/3033 .