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Apple Acquires Zayante
pinqkandi writes "Apple purchased Zayante, a big name in the FireWire/i.Link/IEEE 1394 community. Apple hopes to increase its FireWire presence with this purchase, or, in their own words, 'By acquiring Zayante, Apple is extending its commitment to FireWire as the premiere, high-speed digital interface solution.' Interestingly enough, Zayante works a great deal with Windows FireWire integration ... Windows-compatible iPod anyone?"
btw: this has been up on Apple's news page for quite some time. The article is dated 12 days ago.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Could be worse, could be morons like you.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
If you look more closely, you will see Macs being faster at some things than PCs. That, and they don't run Windoze.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Insightful? Mac Zealot mod! FLAMEBAIT!
.25 cents per IEEE 1394 device. The price is low, so as to compete with USB, which is a truly open standard for all versions.
:)...
Should I reboot my Alpha?
Should I reboot my three VA Linux rack mounts?
Should I reboot my 180 Macs of various flavors?
Should I reboot my 3 1.4 ghz+ athlons?
Apple had an "unfavorable" license agreement on the patents in their portfolio in reference to IEEE 1394. Apple does not own all the patents for IEEE 1394. Sony owns some of them and call the standard "i.Link". Apple owns the name "Firewire" but "1394 LA" owns the IEEE 1394 standard. 1394 LA charges
So, Apple is seeking to own through production something that they only half own through intellectual property terms.
There are a few companies that seek to monopolize their markets. Microsoft monopolizes software on commodity hardware. Intel had an x86 monopoly prior to AMD's introduction of the Athlon. Rambus attempted to monopolize all current generation memory types for all hardware. Apple seeks to monopolize desktop publishing/graphic art, amateur DV editing and hopes to regain their monopoly in K-12 education.
As long as I have an IT budget and some morality, I will vote with my dollars against immoral business practices. I inherited 180 macs that are absolute pieces of shit compared to what was available from "commodity" hardware vendors from the same time period, especially for the price that was paid for them. I cherish the few clones in my mac inventory for their quality and upgrade ability. It is a mac myth that Apple stopped licensing their hardware to outside vendors on the basis of clones ruining Apple's image of quality. The clones had superior quality to what apple was offering at the time. In most cases, clones offered identical performance for half the price and much better upgrade ability. Apple likes their customers to be forced to buy a whole new machine instead of just upgrading the parts that are deficient.
As it stands, Apple has not advanced the internals of their hardware in two years. The Gamecube, with a 485mhz G3 that implements a partial altivec instruction set, retails for $199. The 500mhz G3 iMac retails for $800. A game console has cought up with a mac for performance.
ATA 66? 100mhz fsb? 1000mhz from a processor that performs clock for clock the same as a Pentium III? SDRAM?
Those of you that love your macs, love them for their gloss, not their performance or price. Those of you that are Mac zealots, have been steamrolled by the Apple marketing machine.
Example:
Let's pit 3 dual processor 1533mhz athlon XPs against 1 800mhz G4. Price point is $1600
In one corner, you have a single bottom end apple G4 tower at 800 mhz.
800MHz PowerPC G4
256K L2
cache
256MB SDRAM memory
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-RW drive
ATI Radeon 7500
56K internal modem
In the other corner we have 3u of Dual processor athlon goodness.
3 tyan tiger AMD 760mp chipset motherboards @ $504.
6 1800XP Athlons @ $303 (yes, they work).
3 256mb PC2100 registered ecc DDR ram @ $195.
3 1u cases w/300w power supplies @ $120.
3 40gb hard drives @ $159.
Price point is $1281.
Now rewrite your code.
Which takes 3 weeks, by which time Apple raises the price of the G4 another hundred dollars while the price of the cluster drops a hundred dollars.
(please note that in a previous version of this post I made that prediction, when in fact the price has dropped by over $300.)
Ok, that was a flame, let's stick to matters at hand.(Turned out to be not enough of a flame)
Referencing the altivec article, the ars technica article and the c't article (you know which one I'm talking about, that place where you dare not look, you'll find x86 there staring back at you) we can draw these assumptions:
The G4 with Altivec performs equally clock for clock with x86 w/SSE with some rare exceptions where it performs 100% faster clock for clock.
best case scenario for our similar priced systems using the best case for the G4 benchmark, rc5:
Single G4 800mhz 8,243,188 keys per second
6 AMD 1800XP 32,987,538 keys per second
300 dollars less expensive, x86 is 4 times as productive.
Seti@home using Ars Lambchop benching wu: Identical!
3.35 per work unit.
x86 is 6 times as productive for 300 dollars less.
CINT2000: base 648 - XP1800
CINT2000: base 242 - G4 800mhz
684 vs 242... and that is a single processor comparison!
If we can optimize to scale, x86 is 16 times as fast for 300 dollars less.
If you know of any benchmarks where Mac can compare favorably for the price, please let us all know. You are right, Mhz is not everything. But you have to get some numbers to back the claim that the G4 is even marginally close in performance to machines with well over twice the clock speed. I'm sure that will convince us all to run out and buy Macs for number crunching
This is where your love of Apple has led the company. You buy blindly so they sell overpriced shit and call it gold.
Debating Mac zealots is so easy because a Mac zealot's mind is weak enough to believe the Apple marketing lies.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.