Gutted Apple Tower Powered By Athlon XP 2400+

Ill Mitch writes "You have to see what the guys at the [H]ardOCP have done this time. Not only is it incredible to look it, it is a powerhouse as well. This is sure to upset the Mac-addicts. 2.25GHz of AMD Athlon XP power tucked very neatly inside a customized Apple G4 case. They call it the 'Rotten Apple'."

Comments

PC cases

[brejc8]

retrosystem has a few cool PC cases from other computers.
Also here is my attempt at it with an Atari ST.
I'm gonna try the Apple II next.

the audacity of them!

[realgone]

This is sure to upset the Mac-addicts.

Ah..... no.

Hate to be the one to break it to you, but as upsetting events in my life go, this one ranks just below Sandy Duncan replacing Valerie Harper on The Hogan Family.

Which is to say, not at all.

Re:the audacity of them!

[Atzanteol]

Yeah, and right up there with the day Alf was cancelled...

Re:the audacity of them!

[Anonymous Coward]

They cancelled ALF?

Oh yeah, that's manly... [snort]

[dbrutus]

I took one look at the color scheme and immediately thought flamenco dancer (and not the male half of the traditional duo). It doesn't look bad but really, what's with the sexual insecurity bit? After all, traditional beige isn't really a very manly color while silver or other metallics are not normally considered feminine. It strikes me as pretty desperate.

The only thing these guys want is an easy to open case with integrated handles and small interior lights that go on when you open it up. And with all the case manufacturers out there making cases to the ATX standard the closest they could find was a non-ATX case. What a damning indictment for the whole sector.

Re:Oh yeah, that's manly... [snort]

[DavidRavenMoon]

I took one look at the color scheme and immediately thought flamenco dancer (and not the male half of the traditional duo). It doesn't look bad but really, what's with the sexual insecurity bit?

Yeah.... Maroon! I picture a velvet leisure suit....

And posing it on the table with the (still in plastic) potpourri candle... very manly!

I guess silver and gray is for sissys. ;)

Has anyone noticed that the air vents in the new case make the G4 look kind of like a Jeep?

Re:Oh yeah, that's manly... [snort]

[PythonOrRuby]

Has anyone noticed that the air vents in the new case make the G4 look kind of like a Jeep?

Tsk tsk... any real man knows that Jeeps have 7 vertical openings, not 4. ;-)

Re:Oh yeah, that's manly... [snort]

[Alan Partridge]

Jeeps are for fucking Barbie and Ken. Real men drive Honda Civics and women crazy in bed.

Re:Oh yeah, that's manly... [snort]

[DavidRavenMoon]

Jeeps are for fucking Barbie and Ken. Real men drive Honda Civics and women crazy in bed.

Ha ha ha!

Re:Oh yeah, that's manly... [snort]

[operagost]

Why don't you buy a Miata or a Cabrio and go totally out of the closet?

Apache

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally a quicksilver that will run apache at a reasonable rate....

Re:Apache

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, not that this has anything to do with anything, but they did NOT use a Quicksilver case. It's an older graphite 'El Capitan' case from the first G4s. You can tell from the square drive doors and the louvres on the handles.

Nice box! ...huh uhuhu huhuhhu

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is sure to upset the Mac-addicts."

Yes, I am so terribly upset, that I probably won't be able to sleep tonight. Upset that these people will probably breed some day.
Seems like it would have been a lot less work, and a lot less money, to find a clever handle and bolt it on to a nice ATX case from Alienware or Lian Li. Then you would not have had to have your masculinity threatened, either. I know I personally chose my Quicksilver G4 because it goes so nicely with my silver stiletto pumps. But now your completely safe, and everyone will think you are the perfect dude.

At your LAN party.

They got an empty case, right?

[BitGeek]

IT sounded like they got an empty case to put this motherboard in, right? They didn't buy a G4 and then downgrade it with that really slow processor, did they?

Well, if you have a slow processor and a spare empty case, why not put them together. I really don't see what the big deal is.

If you can't afford the whole computer, sure, why not cobble something together from parts. There's not reason to feel "rotten" just cause you don't have G4 running inside-- hell if you didn't go and tell the whole world, only the people who saw your machine running would know its slow.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

slow, real slow.... twice as fast kind of slow

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[TheSunborn]

Downgraded? Even apples own blast test show that the amd chip is faster then the G4 with any usefull data(That is string length=11)

Martin Tilsted

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't case if it alters the fabric of space-time itself. If I have to use Windows (or worse, Linux), I'm not gonna touch the cråp thing. I'd rather carve 1's and 0's into stone tablets than get another dåmn PC to see my network.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[BitGeek]

While Macs are faster than PCs, I was really joking. I don't wish to seriously debate the issue-- there are people who would rather get paid $100 every week than $1,200 every 60 days... and those people buy PCs and think they are twice as fast. No matter how much I tell them the latter is a better deal, they go "but I get paid 8 times more often!" They confuse frequency with bandwidth.

But since you said Apple says this is so, could you provide a link to Apple's test results showing AMD's much faster?

Thanks.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

HERE is one that says otherwise....

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Perdo]

Insightful? That is an absolute Troll.

How much dry elitist apple crap do we have to put up with?

This is a cool mod. Why does BitGeek feel the need to break it down?

He says "slow processor" when the 1800 mhz Athlon has benchmarked on many independent tests as being faster than the fastest dual G4 system Apple has. Bitgeek talks about superior architecture and bandwidth when the most recent macs use DDR just as a marketing ploy. Their performance is actually 3-5% slower than identicly clocked G4s using SDRAM. They cobble fast memory onto their low bandwith processor with a memory translator hub similar to Intel's failed MTH design... All for marketing.

He says "If you can't afford" showing extreme class distain and prejudice.

Absolute crap post.

So, bitgeek, tell us, where are you coming from on this? Why the need to criticize other people's art? Did you gain anything? Does it make you feel good? Are you really that insecure? How invested are you in Apple?

Disclaimer: I sold my Apple shares in July of 2000.

Perhaps he should have too.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Longing]

I'd much rather get paid $100 every week than $1200 every 60 days, because I'll make $1257 every 60 days. That's enough for a another PS2 game every two months!

Cheers!

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[TC (WC)]

I'd much rather get paid $100 every week than $1200 every 60 days, because I'll make $1257 every 60 days. That's enough for a another PS2 game every two months!

That's just... wrong... 60 days is just over eight and a half weeks... You'd be making $857 every 60 days...

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[rampant mac]

slow processor

Come back here when your X86 can run Mac OS X at a decent speed. Oops, not enough registers...

If you can't afford the whole computer, sure, why not cobble something together from parts.

Sad really. Would you do the same thing to a Porsche?

Hell if you didn't go and tell the whole world... [*snip*]

I feel the exact same way towards Linux :)

Hell, if I weren't for that darn desktop...

Now reformat this into a nice PDF document, send it to me as a PowerPoint presentation, but first let's fire up a desktop publishing app... Oh.. umm.. erm. Quark, anyone?

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Longing]

Holy toledos, batman!

I love it when I make mistakes when correcting other's mistakes. Thanks for pointing it out. :)

Cheers!

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

The current high end of apples offerings is a "Dual 1.25GHz PowerPC G4". I would hope this could flog a _single_ processor x86 chip. It would be sad if it couldn't. Mhz for mhz it would be x86 with its 2.25g, against Mac's combined 2.5g. Granted, if apple increased the mhz of their chip, or the vapor G5 came out it would be a much better processor.

However I only need that much power for a processing workhorse. Fsck gear heads who spend the better part of that day in chat rooms talk'n about how they are just sooooo l33t with their 0day hardware. If I needed a workhorse it sure as hell wouldn't be a Mac.

While I would love a Mac as a workstation, I would prefer a dual x86 running Linux. Don't get me wrong, BSD is cool and all, but it doesn't have half the developers Linux does. Talking about what processor I would use is futile, as I'm not going to purchase one any time soon, and the research that goes into such a purchase is highly involved and tedious.

As for the following comment:

"The P4 2.8GHz and the Xeon 2.4GHz are the ONLY 2 chips on CPU Scorecard [cpuscorecard.com] which are ranked above the G4 1.25GHz."

There is a class action lawsuit against several PC companies as well as Intel. The lawsuit is over a lack of performance increase with this new chip over the PIII. This isn't really the chips fault. What it comes down to is the software. If its not designed to take advantage of the new core its not going to be any faster, and in some cases can be slowed down by poor backward compatibility design as in this case. Its not your hardware's fault that you run 32bit software on a 64bit machine.

So, for both my Mac and PC gear heads I can only say this. It doesn't matter how fast your CPU is when you don't know how to properly use your computer to its fullest potential. Then again why would you want to write dynamic flow software? What the hell do you care about aerodynamics? Now go and play your little video games, look for warez and download those new scripts that make you the l33t little etard you really are.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Ok, so clock frequency != performance. We know that. However, by any reasonable performance metric (no, Photoshop tests don't count because Photoshop is highly AltiVec optimized but not very well SSE/MMX/SSE2 optimized), the Athlon/P4 creams the PowerPC. Look up the benchmarks for yourself. Artificial benchmarks, real world benchmarks. It doesn't matter. The G4 always pulls ahead in one or two benchmarks but loses in most of them.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Drakino]

They confuse frequency with bandwidth.

*cough* Too bad Apple slapped in higher frequency memory into the new G4s (DDR) without increasing the bandwith to the CPUs.

The x86 platform is faster period. Sure, the PowerPC chips will outpreform the x86 chips when they are evenly clocked. But good old Motorola just can't advance the PowerPC platform, so Apple is reduced to doubling up the CPUs again to try to keep people buying. Hopefully this stall in CPU speed won't last as long as the 500mHz G4 stall did.

As much as I love OS X, it will never gain the market accpetance it needs unless Apple does something drastic soon.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[jchristopher]

While Macs are faster than PCs,

If Macs are "faster than PCs" then why does OS X go so much slower than Windows 2000? Seriously, I want to know how you can make that claim with a straight face.

Even with Jaguar, the "speedhole" G4 towers at dual 900+ mhz still "feel" slow, especially when running web browsers.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[MoneyT]

Internet explorer feels slow no matter what system you use.

And 2k was no speed demon either (not for me anyways)

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[DeeKay]

Ok, so clock frequency != performance. We know that. However, by any reasonable performance metric (no, Photoshop tests don't count because Photoshop is highly AltiVec optimized but not very well SSE/MMX/SSE2 optimized), the Athlon/P4 creams the PowerPC. Look up the benchmarks for yourself. Artificial benchmarks, real world benchmarks. It doesn't matter. The G4 always pulls ahead in one or two benchmarks but loses in most of them.

Compare here or here (or here! to here ..and no, there's simply no single-CPU Config for the big Workhorses anymore! ;-)

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[DeeKay]

a) can you specify in how far they're slower? GUI, network performance, Application launching?

b) If you're referring to the GUI (likely!), well, that's because the Quartz GUI is actually a whole new approach that's simply more demanding than Win2k's old-generation GUI! They did, however accelerate it alot in 10.2's OGL-accelerated Quartz Extreme, you should really check that out! I can run the iTunes Vizualizer and 2 transparent browserwindows and a transparent terminal on top of it with no fps-drops whatsoever.. on a 700MHz G3 iBook with a measly 16MB Radeon M6! Windows still need to be rendered by the CPU initially, but all the compositing is offloaded onto the 3D-Hardware! That's something that's due for Longhorn somewhen after 2005!

c) If you really wanna compare, be fair and compare to WinXP, which has GDI+ (non-accelerated yet!), which is a classic blatant M$-steal (again!) of Apple's Quartz concept! And XP's GUI sure is just as slow as Aqua was before 10.2, just be fair and don't compare G4-400s with 1.8GHz Athlons or 2.8GHz P4s!

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[BitGeek]

Oh, that's really funny!

So you want to do a "reasonable comparison" by turning off floating point path processing and compare two floating point math chips?

You just admitted macs are faster-- photoshop, which is optimized for BOTH platforms, runs much faster on a mac.

Could it be because of the Altivec accelleration? You say yes, and you're right! The G4 IS much faster!

Sheesh.

Tell you what... if you want that to be your standard, then I will insist we run both processors at the same clock speed. Just to be fair, after all, right!

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Suppafly]

Amen. When you are right, you're right.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[jchristopher]

If you're referring to the GUI (likely!), well, that's because the Quartz GUI is actually a whole new approach [arstechnica.com] that's simply more demanding than Win2k's old-generation GUI!

As the end user, I don't particularly care WHY it's slow. I only care that it IS slow.

I understand the technical reasons why the GUI is slower. That doesn't make it okay.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[KewlPC]

Actually, Photoshop is widely known to be more heavily optimized for Macs than for PCs, nevermind the plugins.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[DeeKay]

Actually, Photoshop is widely known to be more heavily optimized for Macs than for PCs, nevermind the plugins.

Hmm, i wonder why Intel keeps praising it as a Posterchild-example for P4-optimized software!
Same goes for Quake3 btw!

I agree with you on the renderfarm bit below btw!.. Macs don't make that much sense for a renderfarm, although a few xserves do the job just nicely, although a bit more pricey for this job, but cheaper for others! (Large & fast HDs! ;-)

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[DeeKay]

As the end user, I don't particularly care WHY it's slow. I only care that it IS slow.

I understand the technical reasons why the GUI is slower. That doesn't make it okay.

a) Have you seen 10.2's Quartz Extreme? If you haven't, don't judge unless you know the current state!

b) If you compare Quartz, then compare it to the way slower XP GUI! Be fair, that's all i'm asking for!

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[jchristopher]

Yes, I've seen 10.2. It's still slow.

I don't care about XP. It may be slow, also. Fine. If so, I'm glad I haven't used it.

And sorry, just because XP is slow, doesn't make it ok for OS X to be slow.

There are currently modern GUIs available to me (KDE, Gnome, Windows 2000) that don't lag. OS X is too annoyingly slow to be on that list.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[DeeKay]

Yes, I've seen 10.2. It's still slow.

Weird.. What Machine? Runs just fine here on a 3 year old G4-400 with gf2mx if you ask me, but i guess tastes differ! ;-)

I don't care about XP. It may be slow, also. Fine. If so, I'm glad I haven't used it.

That's okay.. It just seems that loads of people don't have a problem with XPs GUI even though it's just as slow!.. Usually people are comparing top PCs to Macs that are about 3 years old, which is simply an unfair comparison! Don't forget that Quartz Extreme already has 3D-Hardware-Acceleration, something Windows will be lacking for another.. urm.. 3 years atleast? :-)

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[jchristopher]

Weird.. What Machine?

Oh, come off it already. The speed problems of OS X have been well publicized, so stop acting like I'm the first person to mention it to you.

For comparison purposes, I'm typing this on an HP Omnibook 500. I paid $800 for it on eBay. It was new (old stock). I'd guess it's about 2 years old.

Windows 2000, even on this 'old' machine is far faster than OS X on anything Apple sells at any price, including the desktops. And I'm not talking about SETI@home units, I'm talking about things that directly affect the user - scroll speed, text input, manipulating files and windows, working the menus.

Somewhere around 1999, computers finally got fast enough that my computers starting waiting on me for input, rather than me on them to finish computing something. Using a Mac is like stepping into the twilight zone, where I have to wait for every menu and mouseclick to respond.

P.S. I'm no Mac hater. OS X is really nice. I had an iBook until about 2 months ago. Unbearably slow, even with 640 MB of RAM. I just couldn't take it, so I sold it.

The web browsers on that system felt like Mozilla on a 486.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[DeeKay]

Oh, come off it already. The speed problems of OS X have been well publicized, so stop acting like I'm the first person to mention it to you.

Ofcourse there were complaints, but 10.1 brought quite some improvements and 10.2 brings even more now! That's a fact and you can read pretty much any 10.2 review you want and will find many people that say it feels like they have a new computer!
No CPU-Load with the GUI compositing anymore! Hugely improved Application launching (just compare Omniweb bounces on 10.1.5 to 10.2!)..

Neglecting all these improvements and still blowing the "OS X is slow as hell!"-horn is just plain ignorant!

Could you just please stop comparing OS X to Win2k? Apples and Oranges!.. If you want to compare, compare the respective current offerings! Which means WinXP! M$ doesn't even sell Win2k anymore to regular customers, so there! ..Just imagine how fast the GEOS-GUI would run on your machine compared to Win2k!.. Wow!... Get my point?

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel and AMD x86 CPUs do much better on the SPEC integer benchmarks (http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cint2000. html) than PowerPCs, and the PowerPCs used for these benchmarks are the ones running in IBM workstations, which tend to have much better memory subsystems than Macs.

Benchmarks are only useful to a certain extent. At the end of the day, what matters to any given user is that users workload. I like Macs (I used to own/use them), but they were always noticably slower at everything I did (programming, word processing, spreadsheets, games) than PCs.

In the early 68k days, the difference wasnt so big, but as the clock speeds of the 68040 started to lag so far behind the 486, the speed difference became very noticable. I had thought the PowerPC would change that (RISC was still hot in those days), but with the emulation overhead it was actually worse, so I gave up.

I recently tried OS X on a Mac, and although its a very nice OS, I dont find the UI as good as Windows (the better keyboard support on Windows is the main thing I prefer, but there are others), and it feels slow as hell. I dont know if its the OS, the CPU or even the video card, but I just wouldnt be able to use one of the current crops of Macs for day-to-day work -- my PC is snappier over Remote Desktop (at 100mpbs, mind you)!

I still like Macs, and I hope Apple can either get some decent PPCs or dump it in exchange for Intel processors, but until something like that happens theres just no way I could fathom using a Mac as my primary system. Noticable lags when switching applications or moving windows are things I havent seen on PCs in years.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[operagost]

Yes they do.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[BinxBolling]

The web browsers on that system felt like Mozilla on a 486.

Out of curiosity, which browsers did you try?

I use Win2K on a 1.something GHz Pentium in the office, and OS/X on a G4/450 at home. For a long time, I was inclined to think that OS/X was much slower than Win2k. I mainly felt this way because IE for Windows was so blazing fast compared to any of the browsers I'd tried on the Mac, and, well, I spend a lot of time in a browser.

However, I've just started using Chimera as my browser on the Mac, and it's really sharply improved my general impression of the system's speed; Chimera, while probably still marginally slower than IE on Win2k, is much, much faster and more responsive than any other OS/X browser I've tried.

I still think that OS/X is slower than Win2k, but the gap seems much, much narrower, now. Certainly I don't feel like I'm in that 'twilight zone' you describe, any more.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[adamx12]

Macs don't make that much sense for a renderfarm, although a few xserves do the job just nicely

Good point.

Re:They got an empty case, right?

[jon_c]

just to fill ya in, the new XP GUI is about 10% slower then the older 2k one. so aprox 500x faster then a top of the line OSX box.

nice

[Assimil8or]

sick but cool ;=)

Be manly with potpourri

[MyNameIsFred]

It's hard to believe his aim of making a manly computer when he has a matching potpourri candle next to the computer.

Rotten Apple benchmarks and drag racers?

[RemiT]

Yo, Pudge: Keep an eye out for us for ANY benchmark numbers for serious PhotoShop, BLAST, Maya rendering jobs or the like on the gameboys' Rotten Apple. The Rotten paint job doesn't QUITE have me itching to pop an Alpha Screamer into my old Packard Bell TV console for a clock-speed shredding showdown....
("Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, at Irwindale Raceway, a Nitro-snorting funny box showdown between....)

(Wonder what I can put those old ZX-81s in? Gotta dune buggy shell out back with a flamin' paint job)

Oh, I got it: Strip 8 TiBooks and mount the boards in an ATX case, paint it Blue and....

ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Re:Rotten Apple benchmarks and drag racers?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, Let's take BLAST.

In contrast to you, I actually use BLAST on a daily basis, and I was thrilled when Apple announced that it was now 5 times faster.

That is, until I tried it on a Mac.

The first thing you should know is that there are several versions of BLAST. Apple took the completely free, but slow, NCBI one. Other versions like WU-BLAST are several times faster.

First - they only provide any speedup for insane wordsizes like 40, and there the speedup is about 50% COMPARED TO THE SLOWEST PC VERSION, nowhere near the 500% they claim.

Second - a wordsize of 40 is essentially unusable since it results in an extremely low sensitivity. There IS a reason why most blast versions are heavily optimized for the default word size of 11.
The WU-blast version is faster even on the very long wordsizes.
Still, it should be faster at a word size of 11 too right? Sorry - it's faster than a non-altivec Mac, but it's still slower than a 2 GHz Pentium4 (and note that the fastest P4 is now 2.8 GHz).

Just be recompiling BLAST with the intel compiler (free for academia) gives you a 30-40% boost, which means a $1500 PC is about twice as fast on BLAST as the top-of-the-line Mac.

Hint to Apple: You just did a very good job of alienating a potential switcher. We spent a couple of days of hard work, just to find out that you were basically lying us in the face about performance. Our new Athlon cluster performs beautiful, and we will probably be very hesitant in trying your hardware again in the close future.

Re:Rotten Apple benchmarks and drag racers?

[dbrutus]

So, WU-BLAST runs faster than Apple BLAST? Ok, you're the expert, so I'll take your word for it but why didn't you try WU-BLAST on OS X instead of just comparing it to Apple BLAST? It is a supported platform after all.

"Under MacOS X, WU BLAST is the only BLAST that uses multiple G4 processors to run faster. Other BLAST implementations, including Apple's own, either don't use multiple G4 processors or actually run slower when two processors are requested. Unlike the others, WU BLAST won't crash or hang your system when the use of multiple CPUs is attempted and it yields the most accurate results. WU BLAST also does not utilize any G4-specific instructions for peak performance, so while Apple might appreciate your doing this, you don't have to scrap your old G3 and buy a new G4 in order to run the fastest BLAST. WU BLAST runs on the same hardware that MacOS X runs on, although it will run faster on a G4 and again up to twice as fast on a dual G4."

It sounds like the WU-BLAST team has a greater appreciation of the platform than you do.

You're licensed, right, and not just using the 2.0a19 preview because your cheap? In that case you should have access to a Mac OS X binary.

Oh, and if you get much improved performance using WU-BLAST, can you imagine what it's going to be like when they actually tune it for Altivec?

I'd give it another whirl when IBM let's those 8 way superscalar G-5 PPC chips out the door.

WTF?

[Lurkingrue]

So, someone gutted a nice ole' tower, and put an intel-like system inside...And this is news?

Aside from the fact that its been seen here before, I (a "mac fanatic" am much more likely to get upset by folks making their beautiful old Mac Pluses into aquariums.

Can't worry about all the idiots let lose in the world...and anyway, this just means that Apple designed a very functional and beautiful case. As if we didn't know already.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a gutted Mac SE here. All the parts were carefully removed and put in a box. Does anyone want to make me a decent offer for it or should I just order the tank to put in it?

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, making them into aquariums is making you upset? I throwed mine away did nothing with it, but I was first thinking of smashing it up...

Im still wondering what to do with my Mac SE/30... got any ideas?

someone did this not too long ago...

[Leimy]

So... like why is this important news? I don't think this would upset any mac user... it might make them laugh a bit that someone would throw away the expensive Mac innards for cheap PC stuff.

:)
Of course most newer PC's will outrun a Mac easily but I really dig the Mac experience... especially with OS X :).

I don't even turn my dual MP 1600 system on anymore... it went two weeks before I decided to buy another mouse for it so I could run windows. UT2003 is out though so I may turn it on again today :)

Re:someone did this not too long ago...

[dbrutus]

Actually the mac innards were ruggedized in a different case to make it more survivable for some heavy duty traveling use (concert tour? who knows) and the fellow doing this ended up with a useless case on his hands which he donated for the project. No macs were actually harmed in the making of this flamenco dancer case. B-)

Re:someone did this not too long ago...

[TellarHK]

When you realize that UT2003 is no big deal, feel free to send that unused machine my way. I'll take it off your hands. ;)

Re:someone did this not too long ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just played it last night and it is cool. My system would be nicer if I upgraded. (again)

sound of crackling plastic.

[lateral]

Er... a 2.25GHz electric barbeque in a big plastic case, does anyone else smell flame grilled plastic?

L

Re:sound of crackling plastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

No they are properly cooled and are made with a process that that is superior to the G4. G4 is slower. shittier. I hate it, I have 6 machiens at home, one is a G4 500/1MB. FUCK YOU IT FUCKING SUCKS. Zealots.

Thoroughbred-A
1700+ 1467 266 (133*2) 128K 256K .13 80 37.2 Socket A $114 1.5 49.4 ? Jun10, 2002
Thoroughbred-B core
2600+ 2133 266 (133*2) 128K 256K .13 84 37.6 Socket A $297 1.65 68.3

1000 133 64KB
-32K I cache
-32K D cache 256K on chip up to 2MB off-chip .18 micron 106 33 mil 483-pin CGBA JAN 2002

OS X 10.2, G4 CPUs.

I'm sorry, but I have a G3 B&W Yosemite Rev 1 at home, I kept a PPC around to see how Jaguar and OS X matured (I had great hopes). (I got it for free - I snagged it when a .bomb fired a useless MAC "professional" on the way down. I was one of the last to go (because I am a useful person), the Mac users were the first to get laid off HA HA HA).

It's upgraded to 1GB Mem, G4-500/1MB, PCI Radeon 7000 32MB and a new 40GB/2MB Maxtor with FDB technology. (I had to patch the 1.4 firmware from Sonnet because Apple is SCUM and block G4 CPU upgrades because they are pigs).

All I have to say to Mac "people" (zealous animals).

HAHAHHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAH.

HAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHHAHA.

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I'm selling it to a zealot on Ebay. OS X is such a fucking Hack, and PPC is dead - slow as SHIT.

All the apps for Mac are commercial AND overpriced. The GNU/Open/Free/BSD free apps are for *nix, not and approximations of one.

The best applications on Mac are Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. HAHAHAHAHA. It's so true. Closely followed by Adobe applications.
The funny thing is I CAN USE THEM ON A PC, faster.

OS X installer package manager sucks. Apple, check out FreeBSD.

OS X windowing system is closed, slow as fuck, and memory hogging. Apple, check out FreeBSD.

OS X takes FOREVER to "optimize" after installs. Whatever. Check out FreeBSD. Installs are fast.

OS X is easily corrupted. Don't use the command line, if you edit the wrong thing. POOF. Apple, check out FreeBSD. (Oh yeah, gotta love that windows-like registry crap, no you cant edit /etc like a normal human being.)

Mach kernel is arcane. Carnegie Mellon deprecated development on it in 1994.

Steve Jobs is an arrogant, complete fuck. Not that Ellison and Gates isn't, but Jobs is an industry loser. From his first intellectual property theft at Xerox, to his failed NeXT, to his current job as Chief at Apple, he is rude, arrogant and has done nothing but create a pack of rabid zealots in what could have been an enlightened Unix loving user segment.

And now, Linux on PPC. NetBSD on PPC. ANYTHING ON PPC. It's a joke. It's a laughable joke.

All I have to say is NT 4.0 on a PPC with an XP-like GUI is more mature than OS X is today. BeOS would have been great. But this horribly proprietary slow, fat, shit system based on one of the worst incarnations of BSD I have EVER seen, Darwin, is just crap.

And that's just what Apple users are used to getting. Expensive hardware, and crap, inferior software. OS X is a lot closer to[and crappier than - relative to Windows 2000] Windows than Unix.

FreeBSD or DIE baby.

I have come to put down apple zealots once and for all. I have put together enough evidence to end this argument forever.

Bruising by Apple Roland Miller III - and other cases against apple

One notable fact concerning Apple's customer base is that it has always tested very highly in the category of brand loyalty. "Once a Mac user, always a Mac user." Apple has depended on this customer loyalty to get it through some rough times. It could always count on a portion of the market to continue to buy Apple products and continue to upgrade with Apple products. Despite (or perhaps due to) this loyalty, Apple has subjected its customers to some decidedly anti-customer abuses.

The latest example of Apple bruising its customers is a doozy. Due to shortages of the higher speed G4 processors, Apple speed reduced its entire line by 50 MHz and kept the prices the same. On top of that, Apple unilaterally cancelled all outstanding G4 orders with instructions that customers should reorder their systems. This has the net effect of increasing everyone's cost for the same system.

Needless to say, this action produced a massive and immediate customer backlash. Based on what I have seen on the net, this uproar lasted a few hours before Apple backed down and started to rejoin reality. After about a day of total confusion and rampant rumors followed by a week of small clarifications, Apple made right and reinstated all G4 orders except the high end 500 MHz model. Those customers were offered the choice of purchasing the "new" 450 MHz model at the original 450 MHz price, which is what should have been done in the first place.

While it is possible for me to see some corporate logic behind the original decision, never the less, this bright idea should not have left the meeting room where it was hatched. It doesn't take an MBA
(obviously) to predict the firestorm that was touched off when this decision was implemented. The only positive thing I can see in this fiasco was the speed at which corrective steps were implemented. The corporation responded to its customer's will and proved somewhat nimble in the process.

Another recent example of Apple bruising was with AppleShare IP 6.2. Apple decided to charge several hundred dollars for this upgrade (the previous being 6.1.) The only problem was that aside from a few new features, it was mainly seen as a bug-fix and compatibility upgrade for MacOS 8.6 (which itself was a free upgrade to 8.5.1.) You couldn't run ASIP 6.1 on 8.6 and you couldn't run the upgrade on 8.5. Again, the reaction was very predictable: customer outrage. Apple listened to its customers and eventually made 6.2 a free update to 6.1.

You may have also have heard about Apple purposefully preventing G3 owners from installing G4 CPU upgrades with a firmware upgrade that officially solved another problem. People were again outraged when the rumor was confirmed by all of the CPU upgrade companies. The outrage keyed on false advertising and speculation that Apple released a Trojan horse.

There were unofficial rumors from anonymous Apple employees that this firmware block will be removed with Mac OS 9. However, there has been no official word from Apple concerning this issue. In the meantime, all the CPU upgrade companies have announced that they have gotten around the block and that their respective upgrade will work fine when they ship.

While Apple has responded favorably to two of these examples, all of these misfires do take a toll. Many people simply will not tolerate this sort of behavior from a major corporation. A company simply cannot afford to make too many of these types of decisions and still remain in business.

Ultimately what can be learned from these examples?

The perception of the "bottom-line" doesn't always coincide with the needs of the consumer resulting in corporate mistakes of judgement. Some of them can be bad enough to make the pages of the Laramie Daily Boomerang. I can't speculate on whether these bad decisions were based on stupidity or on over estimating the loyalty of Apple*s customers or both. Apple has taken concrete steps in most of these cases to defuse the situation. As long as Apple continues to admit that it is wrong and make things right immediately, I will still tolerate being one of its customers.

Until next time. . .

dah dah dah.

Apple tried to block G3 owners from upgrading to G4. Nice guys. PowerForce G4 ZIF

The PowerForce G4 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) is the only G4 CPU upgrade you will want to upgrade your "Beige" Power Mac G3, "G3 All-in-One" educational model, Blue and White G3's and the Yikes Motherboard Graphite G4's. The PowerForce G4 ZIF is one of the highest performance CPU products when used with "AltiVec enhanced" software. Utilizing the second generation PowerPC 7410 processor ("G4") the PowerForce G4 includes a full 1 megabyte of backside cache running at up to 220MHz.

G4 ZIF Upgrade vs. 800MHz G4 Apple: PowerForce ZIF G4 550/220/1MB Apple G4 733 Price $289 $1599

The Bottom Line: If you already have quite a bit invested in your Power Mac G3, it just makes sense to upgrade the processor rather than opting for the new G4 systems from Apple. Apple has finally eliminated all of the legacy ports with the removal of the ADB port on the new G4 systems, not to mention the removal of the serial ports, and SCSI on the Blue and White G3 systems. So the choice is clear. PowerLogix saves you hundreds of dollars over the cost of buying a new system!

PowerLogix was the first to release a solution for the G4 ROM block for Blue and White G3s.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum= 60 839
TITLE Firmware Update: Firmware Updates 4.1.7 and Later May Disable Out-of-Spec Third-Party RAM Article ID: Created: Modified: 60839 4/12/01 9/28/01

Read up. Apple is trying to make it harder and harder to use "out of spec" hahahaha memory. Luckily www.crucial.com always works. But imagine, a firmware update that DISABLES YOUR MEMORY.

This is a good start (the buying public is sending a message to Apple, how do the intend to GROW thier market share????????)

http://www.barefeats.com/pmddr.html - new macs slower DDR

SPEC-CPU-2000 (INT/FP)AthlonXP1800MHz 738/624 -- Pentium4 2533 MHz : 893 / 878 -- Power4 1300 MHz : 804 / 1202 -- Itanium2 1000 MHz : 807 / 1356 -- G4 1000MHz 306 / 187 (read and weep http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/ )

SPEC-CPU-2000 (INT/FP)
AthlonXP1800MHz 738/624
Pentium4 2533 MHz : 893 / 878
Power4 1300 MHz : 804 / 1202
Itanium2 1000 MHz : 807 / 1356
G4 1000MHz 306 / 187 (read and weep http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/ )

AthlonXP 1533Mhz
FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE
OpenSSL 0.9.6a speed 5 Apr 2001
137.7
sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 512 bits 0.0009s 0.0001s 1109.2 14497.3 rsa 1024 bits 0.0040s 0.0002s 252.8 5308.0 rsa 2048 bits 0.0220s 0.0006s 45.6 1635.9 rsa 4096 bits 0.1419s 0.0021s 7.0 468.6 dsa 512 bits 0.0007s 0.0009s 1377.3 1161.0 dsa 1024 bits 0.0019s 0.0023s 530.2 437.7 dsa 2048 bits 0.0060s 0.0073s 165.9 137.7

P3 550MHZ x 2
FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT #3
OpenSSL 0.9.6g 9 Aug 2002
39.5
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0027s 0.0002s 375.7 4308.0
rsa 1024 bits 0.0131s 0.0007s 76.4 1499.7
rsa 2048 bits 0.0760s 0.0022s 13.2 451.7
rsa 4096 bits 0.5066s 0.0076s 2.0 130.8
dsa 512 bits 0.0023s 0.0028s 433.2 360.6
dsa 1024 bits 0.0064s 0.0078s 155.3 127.8
dsa 2048 bits 0.0212s 0.0253s 47.2 39.5

1GHz Motorola PPC OpenSSL 0.9.6
33.0
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0024s 0.0002s 422.7 4565.7
rsa 1024 bits 0.0131s 0.0007s 76.2 1433.4
rsa 2048 bits 0.0850s 0.0025s 11.8 396.5
rsa 4096 bits 0.5872s 0.0092s 1.7 108.9
dsa 512 bits 0.0022s 0.0026s 464.3 387.9
dsa 1024 bits 0.0070s 0.0085s 142.8 117.0
dsa 2048 bits 0.0245s 0.0303s 40.7 33.0

G4 867 / 896MB / 10.1.2
24.2
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0029s 0.0003s 346.3 3521.8
rsa 1024 bits 0.0172s 0.0009s 58.3 1062.2
rsa 2048 bits 0.1149s 0.0034s 8.7 293.4
rsa 4096 bits 0.8009s 0.0128s 1.2 78.3
dsa 512 bits 0.0027s 0.0034s 366.6 295.3
dsa 1024 bits 0.0094s 0.0114s 106.8 87.4
dsa 2048 bits 0.0334s 0.0413s 29.9 24.2

Mystery ClawHammer/.
signs/sec verifies/sec
rsa 512bits 965.9 12211.9
rsa1024 bits 205.0 3980.0
rsa 2048 bits 33.0 1093.3
rsa 4096 bits 4.7 288.5

I laugh at you, as i sit on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT on an SMP box that will whip your fucking gay shit machine's ass. With a Cherry on top, I get to use win2k for crap-software.

I just installed 6C115 OS 10.2 final on a G4 with 1GB of ram. SNORE. Youd think Apple would pick up on the fact they have a slow implementation of Unix on slow and inferior hardware.

Look to IBM Power4 or Intel for salvation, Motorola sucks. Intel has a larger payroll that Motorola makes on the PPC, and it shows, losers.

You make me sick you MAC zealot maggot. I see through you. Your snarky little "hahahaha," your non chalant elitist proto-communist attitude. You make me sick. You want to legislate mediocrity because you are a communist and don't believe the biggest, fastest or most qualified should win. Feiss isn't about MAC, It is such a stupid fag-ridden ad campaign, I as a Unix and PC user (as well as SPARC and HPPA) have noticed this CRAP. As far as feiss being cute, I would let her suck me off and I would crap on her for a nice Schei*e video. As far as SPEC marks go, truth hurts, doesnt 'it zealot? You like making Jobs richer? Keep at it losers. The day my company fired an x-apple (& x-NEXT) employee was the day things go better around the office - he was a techno nerd jerk, he wanted technology for technology's sake, not because it was useful. He failed to do his job, and we fired him. I hope you contract terminal cancer you snarky little faceless mac zealot fuck!

Project status as of Oct 1994
CMU is no longer doing general system development work on the Mach Operating System Kernel. The reseach goals of Mach were accomplished and faculty interest in OS research has moved in new directions. As a result, suppport for external users of the Mach kernel is mostly just in the form of on-line help files, documents and unlicensed code. The Mach WWW Home Page will direct you to other sources of information.

There is still some work being done at CMU on the Mach multi-server system (Mach_US) and real-time Mach. Information about both of these areas is accessible from the Mach home page. Mark Stevenson may contacted about Mach_US at jms@cs.cmu.edu. The Mach real-time group can be reached at rt-mach-request@cs.cmu.edu.

Development work on Mach is also continuing at the Open Software foundation, University of Utah's Flexmach project, Helsinki University of Technology's LITES system and the Free Software Foundation's HURD system.

Last updated on Oct, 1994 by mrt@cs.cmu.edu

Apple profits halve in Q2

Jobs preducts flatness ahead

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05

APPLE MADE A NET profit of $32 million for its third quarter, almost half the profit it made in the same period last year, and turnover fell three per cent to $1.43 billion compared to the quarter in 2001.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467

Funny, a BSD platform hanging in the balance because it fails an an MSFT VAR. Its not BSDs fault, trust me, its Apple.

Will Microsoft dump Mac support? http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4485
Two firms slag off each other

By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 12:22

IS MICROSOFT CONTEMPLATING ditching support for Apple Macs? That's the thrust of an article that appeared on Wininfo a day or two back, but if Microsoft is getting out of the Mac market, it's not quite yet.

And all is not well in other respects, reports Mac Rumors, which has posted what it says is an Apple FAQ saying people will have to pay for .mac accounts.

Microsoft has already prepared a press release to time with the Macworld Expo saying that it has announced a Microsoft Office V.x "triple header", this being an announcement which offers better mobility with Palm handheld for Entourage X, a way to buy Office v.X cheaper, and some Windows compatibility with the RDC client.

The Wininfo article, however, quotes Kevin Browne, who runs the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft as saying Apple hasn't made much of an effort to promote Mac OSX, even though there are opportunities.

He is quoted as saying that "if things don't dramatically turn round", it might be Goodnight Mr Chips for Steve Jobs firm.

But the same article says that Apple blames Microsoft for sales problems with Office v.X.

Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates have traditionally had a somewhat strained relationship. Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end between the two companies?

Wininfo.

Mac Rumors is providing a blow-by-blow account of what's happening at MacExpo on the site link above - it seems Apple may well announce support for Nforce 2, too.

On the Nvidia site, here, you'll see that Digital Vibrance Control is "currently unavailable on Mac systems", which is more than just a hint, we guess. *

*JOBS KICKS off MacWorld Expo at the Javitz Center at 09:00 Eastern time. There will be a live Webcast using Quicktime, natch, here.

Note: The Dell 1650 and 2650 are both cheaper, the 2650 has SMT, and ECC (and nice linux ecc support as well, it logs ECC errors in syslog). They also include onboard RAID(option via 7899 asic) and a U160 AIC-7899 by default. And you can buy retail CPUs and retail memory for Dells often at half the price without voiding the warranty.

Apple charges $500 per 120GB EIDE drive. HAHAHAHA.

Apple is right about one thing, that Alpha has existed for some time, but have you ever tried actually buying an Alpha? Its hard, I know an engineer who works for
DEC->/Compaq->/HP, and I was dying to buy one, and he couldnt find
anyone to call me
about getting one.

Apple's New 1U servers: Sorry. Doesn't fit well in a market where the Dell 1550/1650 and 2550 and 2650 exist. Sorry. THEY DON'T PUBLISH SPEC numbers. Apple is a dying breed, I just recently tried to revive my interest in them only to be disappointed. The Motorola PPC architecture is embarrassingly slow, and they always are quick to point out the near-useless Altivec and some obscure filter in Photoshop, but its not true. I have a Mac, several PCs and a SPARC at *home*, so trust me people, this box is a bore. And OS X and Open ClosedROM make putting regular memory, disks and CPU upgrades NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE, they try to block it so you have to buy the same part from them 3x the cost. And the Dell 530 Dual P4-Xeon with SMT buries the fastest Mac by almost a factor of two. OS X is no great shakes as of yet because even though most of the porting off of Classic has been done, there are annoying remnants of classic everywhere, including a gamut of Apple utilities. These are notoriously the worst Administrator-unfriendly boxes in the industry, and I have used a few boxen in my time. OS X's Darwin kernel will be sorely eclipsed by Linux 2.6, and 2.4.X is already superior in all the ways I can tell (This isnt to say BSD it bad, but I dont think this OS demands a PREMIUM). I tried YellowDog, Madrake and Debian on PPC as well, and they ran (even with aggressive G3
optimizations) rather
poorly - but interestingly far faster than native OS X.
This is a dying gasp of air from a dead Unix vendor, who has had to turn themselves into a Microsoft VAR (most popular Mac Application: Microsoft Office X). If you have an insatiable fetish for PPC, DON*T. Wait for Hammer. Remind yourself about SMT, and 2.8GHz clock speeds before you go pay for obsolete/deprecated silicon. And the term RISC? Pathetic. I happily resell our product on a 1650 and 2650. We "configured" a Mac box because we were genuinely curious. We laughed at the final price and moved on. This isn*t a troll, or a flame * its reality. What this box does can be done with a 1650, with redundant power supplies, with SCSI and hardware raid build ON BOARD, dual gigabit NICs onboard, dual 1400 MHZ/512cache Tualatin (with SPEC numbers to gauge the performance
by) (2650 gets high clock Xeons), two 64bit/66Mhz slots, onboard video, console redirection, USB, etc. And for half the price. And you can use retail Intel CPUs,(cheap), retail hard drives (if you don*t want to buy the Dell ones at a modest premium), and retail Crucial.com memory (the same memory Dell uses for Half the price). All in all, you get a box, for half the price, with twice the features and performance. And this is coming from a person who doesn*t even LIKE Dell. (I feel I can always build better more reliable systems than most of the PC vendors.) BBBBBBZT. Apple, you lost, you lost, you will always be niche because OS X isn't where it needs to be * on an X86.

TO give a better link for you, since you will have trouble finding this on your own, I'll put you right where you need to be to see Motorola PPC chips are, well, so horrible they wont publish industry standard Specmarks. http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.ht ml

Sorry. Apple. Steve Jobs keeps them in business but his ego is trash. I know people who work there, personally . You pay for his ego.

Ok. Publish your findings. No, I didnt think so. So its as conjective as my assertations, which are based on my whim in addition to evideince (or lacktherof), and the reading of the CPU Report, EE Times, etc. I'm into this industry, and unless you are a zealot, you would know PPC is IBM now. Motorola is in the dirt.

Bzzt. I like NeXT. Ahead of its time, over priced. Darwin is useless, I have 1.4.1, its crap. OS X is nice looking, but it is *very* easy to "piss" the system off, its package manager is so bad compared to RPM I wont even start, and it is, as as what I consider a *nix to be, wholly inadequate and incomplete. Next.

About being content free, thats a snarky, trollish accusation. Now why dont you use Purify on yourself and remove all the said cruft and actually say something in Apple's defense besides naming Mach 3.0+ (like if it was 5.0+ would it make a shit bit of difference.) I hate zealotry.

And about computing pleasure. This isnt fafenugen or a driving experience, dude, its about stuff WORKING, well, for the lowest cost with the cheapest parts. There is no sex appeal in server administration.

Funny, everytime I have gone to a Mac shop they have, for as long as I can ever remember, always, ALWAYS had NT based servers. Unilaterally.

And I saw a few Mac shops in my time in New York.

You know what, not that I like NT, but they worked more reliably (generally Compaq
servers) than the Macs did. (Mostly these days non parity memory and no SCSI anymore, its a PC with horrible Mot-PPC).

Funny. When I run a linux or *nix or NT based server I dont have a .DOC reader installed. Ever. Maybe a PDF reader if I can't figure something out using google, a few nesgroups and other better-than-manuals-and-man-page sources.

For those wondering why .DOC is still a problem, I have noticed that documents shared even between Office X, XP and 2002 are very inconsistent. Its MSFT playing the upgrade me to fix problems game. For complicated layout and manuals, use Framaker or a LaTeX backended application or something realistic.

As far as OS X being "young", I think its probably the oldest feeling Unix there is. Old kernel, old Unix specification (I happen to like what I find in a SYS V style /etc) and old binaries included without gcc in the default install. Its only young in that Apple does not know very well how to serve people who use unix.

I gave OS X a fair shot on a G3 with 1GB of memory. Its good. I wated to use it instead of Microsoft crap for home use, but I wouldnt switch from Win2k after that. They also block CPU upgrade cards, which are expensive. They try to block 3rd party memory. The included keyboard and mouse always sucks. And they try not to partition non-apple drives with Drive Setup, which is the WORST partitioning utility, and Apple's partition maps are screwed up and stupid, and trying to run OS X without classic is diffcult because so many fools still have ported thier stuff to OS X.

I'll stick to PCs for home computing, and think about other vendors for servers.

I gave OS X a fair shake. I have many machines at home and with Gnucleus I was able to get just about every Mac app compiled native for OS X in existence. (Thank god I wont be keeping any of them or buying any of them - try before you buy, people)

I have to say that the total lack of incumbent middleware is horrible with OS X. Its barely an OS out of the box. I hate having to boot from a CD to manage anything, and its multiboot handling is inferior. The Norton set of tools is pathetically weak for the money. Office X is admittedly excellent. But thats it. IE was mentioned not too long ago as rendering incorrectly and having a huge security flaw that is fixed in 5.2.1, but the response from MSFT took much longer than they do for x86.

If OS X was ported to x86 (looks like it has) I would buy it. Period. Forget buying a PPC ripp off machine though.

I noticed on the OS X cd there is i386 directories littering the place and darwin
(hahahah) works on like one computer with an intel chip deep in the belly of Apple, but they are not trying to make Darwin/X86 more appeling than ANY ANY of the other BSDs, they all destroy Darwin in useablility, even when you get darwin from http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/.

I came, I saw, I mastered it, I left. Its BORING.

And as far as IPFW. IPF for OpenBSD is out. and there are no decent APP-firewalls for OS X (Firewalk sucks), Brickhouse is a joke of a GUI.

I am thinking Kerio Winroute/Personal Firewall as a base comparison. The fact nothing analogous exists in Mac OS X land make this platform more unuseable. Also, if Apple like fit and finish on Unix, why dont they make the more complicated things useable througha GUI (like Brickhouse did for IPF). Noo, the only people Apple caters to is those who die thier hair purple and sucks on pacifier and laugh at baby rattles while they are e-tarded from thier last bout with Xtasy after the cool rave for mac zealots.

1 - Nope, not a troll opinion. People trying to name trolls are often themselves trolling by crying wolf.

2 - Pirate, no. I deleted the software. They are liars because they say on their product literature that the product can do things it simply cannot. Do you buy a car without a test drive. NO. Do lots of states have cool-off periods. Yes. Are you are one of those inferior software developers that cant let people try before they buy because you cant deliver on your promise? Or you just and advocate for that because you benefit somehow?

3 - OS X would be easier to eat (its cheap at $130.) if I could use it on a cheap Intel box. Then I could leave it there, tinker with it, do more to make what I like about other Unices available to OS X. I borrowed a Mac G3 (350/1MB cache, 1GB memory, 15GB HDD/2MB
buffer) and * Linux ran better (Debian, Yellowdog and Mandrake * I did try them all) , * GNU-Darwin was near-useless compared to the Linuxes * let alone that pile of garbage apple calls Darwin 1.4.1, and * Mac OS X was horribly slow and clunky. I also find that Administration in OS X is counterintuitive.

Now to address your pathetic complexes. Your quoting is interesting. You were upset about my thread(s) and were looking to pick apart any of my comments. Grasping at straws. First tactic you used was name calling / labeling. Cheap shot. Then you tried to confuse good consumer strategy (protecting my wallet from thieving/lying software developers who often sell your privacy to marketing companies, and fail to deliver proper support for software and force version upgrades that should be called service packs) with piracy, and thus , you were attempting to assassinate my character. I would never, and have never, created revenue for myself, any of the businesses I have worked for with unlicensed or pirated software. I am an advocate for paying for what you use to generate revenue for yourself. I utterly resent your insinuations. Now you try and hit your own self justified home run by saying "Nah, wah, why would you want OS X if you don*t like it wash." I don*t mind the software, I think it is a meritorious endeavor to have a polished UI on Unix. I don*t see the point in cornering it to a pass* , deprecated, slow SPECmarkless overpriced platform. I would appreciate it far more if it would be ported to x86, but alas, Microsoft would pull the Office X plug because it would compete (rather well I might add) with Windows XP. Therefore, Apple is a Microsoft VAR, their existence is to stay afloat and give their shareholders money, not innovate anything useful in the community.

Sorry I wasn*t fooled by them like you were. I resent you, you are alike Mao, Stalin, Hitler. The experts agree, censorship works. If I am a fool, let me foolishness speak for itself * as writing on this wall* * but you are far more sinister than fool, you want to dictate, excise, remove. You want the world to be as you see it, and cannot accept a subjective opinion because you are probably sexless and very pathetic. I resent you.

I RESENT ALL OF YOU APPLE MAC LUNATIC ZEALOTS!

Airport anyone?

[amichalo]

Does anyone know if they utilized the built-in airport antennas in the G4's handles?

I always thought of the Quicksilver case as the first case to become a peripheral device as well - until it was released, a case was (speaking of Macs anyway), just a good looking dust cover to me.

Read some C.S. Lewis. You'll thank yourself for it.

Re:Airport anyone?

[Alan Partridge]

it's not a "Quicksilver" case. The case was introduced with the Yosemite PowerMac G3 in '98 and is known as "El Capitan". The cheapest way to get one would be with a 350Mhz Yosemite G3. The latest Apple towers have a superficially similar but heavily revised case.

Re:Airport anyone?

[Qwerpafw]

The yosemite case does not have an airport antenna in the handles.

I think the yikes case does, though I am not sure. Anyways, his point is valid in the he was referring to the G4 case in general.

best case on earth

[Snuffub]

This just reinforces my opinion that that case is the best case on earth. I cant understand why everyone's shouting for apple to change it, in my opinion if it aint broke dont fix it.

Gut feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Apple,

I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.

with much gayness,

Father Randy "Pudge" O'Day, S.J.

Re:Gut feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

Sign me up! I feel gayer already!!!

Red?

[Alex Thorpe]

Looks like Apple Red to me. Red like the fruit, not like any computer Apple ever put out.

Still, anyone who'd disembowel a G4 tower for Windows gaming ought to save themselves some time and money and get a console instead, since that's where the 'latest, greatest' games seem to be going to nowadays. If they have some patience, keep it as a Mac.

[h]omo

[Anonymous Coward]

red is the new pink, fellows. what a gay looking case.h

cute box, sailor!

[Home�rew]

the only person cool enough to have a box like that is the guy that won quake con. he could own it just to piss people off... "i kicked yer ass on a girlie box, now what about that !!!! "

Re:cute box, sailor!

[Alan Partridge]

sorry to break it to you, but there's absolutely NOTHING cool about winning Quakecon.

Re:cute box, sailor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you alway have to be a butthead, Alan?

If you have a comment, then fine. Just be nicer.

As of right now...

[Tokerat]

The P4 2.8GHz and the Xeon 2.4GHz are the ONLY 2 chips on CPU Scorecard which are ranked above the G4 1.25GHz.

Heeyyy...Imagine that! Now imagine if Motorola got off their ass and upped the G4's clock speed to 2.8GHz. You'd be blown away. Man I can't wait until the mythical^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H G5 comes out and wipes that smug little x86 grin off your faces.

If a G4 at less than half the clock speed of a P4 can still keep that close in the grand scheme of things, then you, sir, are talking out your ass with a megaphone.

Re:As of right now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there are no 1.25 GHz G4's, just overclocked 1.0 GHz G4's, my overclocked amd is faster.

Re:As of right now...

[sedawkgrep]

Funny that there is no hard data as to how they actually rate these chips.

From the little I've seen, cpuscorecard.com is pure marketing bullshit.

Unfortunately I cannot find any comprehensive benchmarks comparing a G4 to any x86. I find that odd considering there are comparisons between x86 and virtually everything else out there.

If the cpuscorecard crap were true, there wouldn't be all this talk about the need for a G5, or move to POWER4 or other architecture...

I mean seriously - if you had TWO of these "3rd fastest CPU"s available in a system (2 x 1.25 Ghz), there wouldn't be any discussion about any of this. Hell - you don't hear people with >1.6Ghz procs in the x86 realm crying about lack of processing power. If the PPC were really as fast as you say, there wouldn't be any crying from the Mac users either.

Re:As of right now...

[Perdo]

Scorecard uses "iComp"

"The iCOMP value is the weighted geometric mean of four benhcmarks;

ZD(Ziff-Davis) Bench - 68% 16-bit Whetstone - 2% SPECint92 - 25% SPECfp92 - 5%"

"Scorecard" shows the G4 and Athlon 2600 dead even at 89% of the fastest processor, The P4 2.8. That is sort of funny, considering ZD bench which represents 68% of the weighted mean of iComp is not available on the Mac.

Here are some additional resources using more modern benchmarks:

Benchmarks using Spec2000 instead of the woefully obsolete Spec92.

Comparison of The Dual G4 to other platforms in after effects rendering

Here is some raw data from the obsolete 16-bit Whetstone which shows the G4 not even able to match a Pentium II clock for clock.

This comparison shows how the G4 compares to a variety of rivals.

This shows that under most conditions, the SDR equiped Dual G4 is faster than than the DDR version. Meaning the 1.25 GHz G4 is crippled with DDR. Which means the numbers from the other benchmark links will not scale linearly. The Dual 1.25 G4 is actualy slower clock for clock than the G4 with SDR.

Also refrence Ars Technica's Seti benchmark showing that a Dual G4 1 Ghz produces work units at the same speed that a Dual PIII 1 Ghz.

Has anyone found any other Benchmark comparisons of the G4 (besides the single photoshop benchmark on Apple's website) that might shed some light on the debate?

So, choose whatever platform you like, but be informed about what you are paying for.

You buy a mac, you buy it because you like OS X, which is far and away the nicest OS out there right now. You do not buy a mac because of performance, as anyone who follows the links can very plainly see.

Re:As of right now...

[Alan Partridge]

Has anyone found any other Benchmark comparisons of the G4 (besides the single photoshop benchmark on Apple's website) that might shed some light on the debate?

while I KNOW that the fastest x86 chips are currently ahead of the Moto G4, the G4 certainly can lay down the law when it's running the right kind of code. Look here:-

http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/query.cgi?cpu type=all&arch=all&contest=all&multi=1

Re:As of right now...

[Perdo]

CPU Name MHz Contest Speed StdDev StdErr% Count

Power PC 7450/7455 G4 1000 rc5 10,525,403 50841 0.4 3

AMD Athlon XP (Palomino) 2100 rc5 6,128,961 42741 0.6 3

Intel Pentium 4 2800 rc5 5,522,975 0 0.0 1

rc5 has definitely been optimized for altivec. It is a credit to the Mac community that when source code is available, they do an excellent job with optomized ports.

Power PC 7450/7455 G4 1000 ogr 10,579,931 338 0.0 2

AMD Athlon XP (Palomino) 2100 ogr 13,476,744 298544 2.2 2

Intel Pentium 4 2200 ogr 7,684,803 0 0.0 1

Knowing that the Mac community goes out of their way to create altivec optimized ports, the G4's performance in ogr is also quite telling.

While it is unfortunate that the Pentium 4 2.8 has not been benchmarked in ogr, the best it could hope for is about 9.7 million, showing off it's crippled integer instruction prosessor.

While these are not the fastest processors from Apple or AMD, if the numbers scale linearly, as they seem to in refrence to older processors, both processor types should see a 25% performance improvement with current clock speeds.

This is a sticky point. At $3,299.00 for a dual G4 1.25 compared to just over $1000 for a complete dual Athlon MP system, the keys processed at a given cost look like this:

26449827 running two rc5 clients on a dual 1.25 G4.
36773766 running six rc5 clients on 3 dual 2100MPs.

The Athlons are 40% faster at a given price in rc5.

26449827 running two ogr clients on a dual 1.25 G4.
80860464 running two ogr clients on 3 dual 2100MPs.

The Athlons are 305% faster at a given price in ogr.

So, there is a case where the G4 does not get crushed in absolute performance. But like other closed/proprietary hardware manufacturers such as sun and sgi, they pose absolutely no competition to open platforms on price/performance.

Re:As of right now...

[Alan Partridge]

it's a real shame that you introduced the bogus notion of price intothis equation. Sure, Powermacs are RELATIVELY expensive, but not neccesarily ABSOLUTELY expensive. The dnetc results certainly indicate that the Motorola MPC 74xx is a competitiive product at least, with certain outstanding features. Vive la difference, I say, choice is a wonderful thing.

Re:As of right now...

[DeeKay]

Look up the Lightwave-Results I posted in the other Thread and see that a Dual-GHz G4 can very well keep up in CPU-crushing Raytracing even with a top notch (single, granted!) P4! And Dual Xeons aren't buyable in Shops just like that and they're definately not the cheapass PCs you guys say trounces any Mac easily! And yes, Newtek optimized for both for Altivec and SSE2! Ah yes, concerning optimizing: You do know that every CPU-consuming program is optimized for some CPU? Some are for both, others are just optimized for one (=usually the one they're made on!) There's no such thing as a simple compile! Intel's Compilers do auto-vectorizing for SSE2 because the P4s single CPU is so bad (see: First Benchmark-results when the P4 was released and the new compilers weren't used!) sparing the programmer of quite some work f.ex., that's compilers Apple doen't have yet!
Stuff that's just optimized for x86 is e.g. Unreal, stuff that's optimized for both is Lightwave, Quake3 and Photoshop, and oh my, that's exactly the Applications where Macs perform pretty good if not superior in some cases!
See f.ex. the Quake3 comparison in 640x480 on the very same barefeats page you quoted! It's still doing pretty well in 1024x768, but isn't it ironic that the G4 excels especially in resolutions that are more CPU- than bandwidth-bound?

Re:As of right now...

[Perdo]

I don't understand how price would be a bogus factor.

On an application with performance that scales linearly with more machines, such as the distributed client or webserving, the limit to performance is total cost and price/performance.

How fast do you want to spend.

There is no point introducing price/performance into a comparison of photoshop filters because the application will not scale across multiple machines.

In that case you simply compare the two machines performance and question whether you are willing to spend an extra $2000 for inferior performance just because you like the look and feel of one machine over another.

There are other factors. If you are limited by rackspace, then you need to know how much performance you can stuff into 1u reguardless of cost. In Apple's case, they can place a dual processor X Serve in 1u. In competition to X Serve, there are companies putting two dual processor Athlons into a single 1u rack.

Another factor would be performance per watt. If you needed to perform ogr calculations drawing the minimum amount of power, the obvious power difference between running two Macs or a single Athlon become clear.

So, you are right, it is good to have choice. It is good to be able to choose something besides proprietary software on proprietary hardware. Viva la x86, Viva la Linux.

Re:As of right now...

[Alan Partridge]

"So, you are right, it is good to have choice. It is good to be able to choose something besides proprietary software on proprietary hardware. Viva la x86, Viva la Linux."

since when is "x86" non-proprietary? I'll grant you Linux, but intense, margin slashing competition and economies of scale != freedom. If you take the positio that they DO, then the logical conclusion is that one design fits all, and that Linux developers would be better off working for Microsoft.

Re:As of right now...

[Perdo]

PowerPC G4 1000 2 1500 256 Mac OSX 7.5 [572] Textures 4 8 Markus Groeteke Jun 11, 2002

(8 seconds)

AthlonMP 1667 2 1024 256 Win XP 7.0 [b / 543] Textures 8 3 Luca [effector] Feb 11, 2002

(3 seconds)

"yes, Newtek optimized for both for Altivec and SSE2!"

Those are your words. Those are the benchmarks pulled off your site. That is not even half as fast rendering the same frame.

Again the farm economy rules that benchmark. More macines mean better performance. Frame rendering scales linearly with machine count. Which means price performance counts. Which means you can buy 3 dual athlon machines instead of a single G4 tower and not just double the G4s performance, but render frames 6 times as fast for a given cost.

Have fun with quake at 640 x 480... I guess...

Re:As of right now...

[Perdo]

choice = freedom.

open platform = freedom.

Why did Apple kill the clones?

Why didn't Intel kill AMD,Cyrix,Via etc..

Because Apple owns their platform.

And while Intel dominates x86, they do not own it.

x86 is free.

PPC is proprietary.

Could it be any simpler?

If Apple had competition on their platform, do you think you would be paying over a thousand dollars for their bottom end product?

The bottom end in x86 land is just shy of $150 for a complete system. That is competition, sir. That is computing for the masses. That is crossing the "digital divide"

"Switch" to apple to make computing more accessable. Accessible to whom? Accessible to the middle 90% or the Top 5%?

Might as well buy sgi or sun.

Re:As of right now...

[Alan Partridge]

maybe you haven't heard of Microsoft, Compaq, Dell, HP and Gateway. If you think that Macs are a minority pastime, try Linux or self-build PCs. x86 FREE, don't make me laugh.

Re:As of right now...

[DeeKay]

[Textures Benchmark]

Oh my, everyone chooses the benchmarks that suit his point best, right?
Please tick what you consider more CPU-intensive:
[ ] Raytrace
[ ] Textures

Point is: the Macs Performance is not nearly as bad as professional Mac-Flamers like yourself want to make people believe all the time!
Thanks btw for the selective quoting, totally neglecting the point that one can (normally) not buy Dual Athlons or Xeons in the shops anywhere!

Those are your words.

No, actually not (Notice the gains with both and then go on claiming SSE2 is 'superior'!). But go on believing that the Mac is totally inferior if that makes your penis seem bigger! ;-)

Which means you can buy 3 dual athlon machines instead of a single G4 tower and not just double the G4s performance, but render frames 6 times as fast for a given cost.

Taking the Dual GHz above as a Basis, please do tell where i would find a Dual Athlon for $833, which is a third of that Macs cost!
Oh, and make sure it has GBit-Ethernet, 64bit-PCI, a DVD-burner, Indesign, a DVD-authoring software, DV-Videoediting-Software, an Office-package and loads of other goodies, too!.. Oh, damn, i forgot: Software doesn't count cause 1337oes like you get that for free anyway from the FTPs and the donkey!...
Too bad that Software needs to be developed and the costs of that are a significant part of a Macs price, and too bad ignorants like you always fail to get the big picture and look at the machine as a whole!..

btw: here's one of your ex-soulmates!.. Age should be roughly the same!

Re:As of right now...

[Qwerpafw]

PPC is proprietary.

you were fine until then. After saying that, your point kind of flopped around uselessly and died.

PPC is an open standard.

Apple killed the clones two ways. First of all, they stopped selling them motherboards. Yes, thats right, many clones used genuine Apple motherboard. At a lower cost to the consumer. Apple decided this was probably a bad idea, since they were doing the R&D, doing the producion and ads, but were getting shafted wrt profits.
Second of all, Apple declined to renew the Mac OS licensing program for the clone makers. This effectively meant that the clone makers could build PPC macs, but they wouldn't get the ROM needed to boot, and wouldn't be allowed to sell Mac OS whatever installed on the machines.

Of course, now that we have open firmware, there is no rom, and, effectively nothing at all keeping clone makers from existing. But it is just not cost feasible for anyone to design their own motherboards. So Apple is the only mac hardware company.

Re:As of right now...

[Perdo]

What you say seems right, but it seems to me that Apple has closed firmware covering the G3 and G4, basicly there can be no competition on the Mac platform from the flavored mac era forward.

As I understand it, OS X will not boot on Open Firmware, meaning the platform is efectivly closed. Additionaly, even if we got OS X to boot off of non Apple branded hardware, their eula specificly prevents doing so.

I know of plenty PPC embeded and clustering solutions. Browsing the top 500 supercomputer list will reveal many, as well as embedded controllers for IBM and soon to be released Newisys Sledgehammer servers. Additionally, the Game cube uses a 485 mhz IBM 750fx, which is basicly a G3 with partial altivec instructions added.

What I cannot find is a modern G4 based platform not maufactured by apple that is capable of Booting OS X natively. I have seen short lived attempts made, the best example being a hardware development platform for PPC that was put on "indefinite hold" shortly after this years Linuxworld Expo. I was there when an Apple lawyer handed them a court order informing them to pull the display or face an infringement lawsuit.

Reguardless of the outcome, the motherboard was going to be priced far, far out of consumer's range. On the order of $6,000 a copy.

So, unless Microsoft reverse engineers the current firmware as they did for Compaq with IBM's bios, Mac hardware is a completely closed platform.

Modern PPC is effectively closed.

Re:As of right now...

[KewlPC]

Well, if you're buying machines for a render farm (which is what he said they were for), they don't need a DVD-burner, Indesign, DVD-authoring software, video editing software, an office package, and loads of other goodies.

You need a system with a barebones install of your chosen OS + whatever you need for networking, and the rendering software you're using.

Every machine in a renderfarm will be headless (i.e. no keyboard, mouse, or monitor attached), except for maybe the machine in charge of queing render jobs and the like. Maybe.

As for finding a dual-athlon system for cheap, remember that machines to be used in renderfarms don't need expensive 3D accelerators, expensive sound cards, massive hard disks (or any, depending on the speed of your ethernet), expensive sound cards. All you need is 1)one or two fast processors, 2)as much RAM as you can afford to put in each box, and 3)a fast ethernet card (gigabit, whatever). And you most certainly do not need 64-bit PCI, or any PCI, since the computers making up your renderfarm will most likely be rackmount, and therefore have the network card integrated into the motherboard.

Re:As of right now...

[adamx12]

What I cannot find is a modern G4 based platform not maufactured by apple that is capable of Booting OS X natively. I have seen short lived attempts made, the best example being a hardware development platform for PPC that was put on "indefinite hold" shortly after this years Linuxworld Expo.

Mac users upset?

[Macgoon]

Why should we be upset? This is just another example of Windoze users being "Mac Wannabes." They never get the point - the good looks of Mac products are just icing on the cake. It's the OS that counts. No matter how good looking a PC may be, even if it's stuffed into a Mac case, it will still suck because it runs Windoze.

Hihi..

[Noodlenose]

The funny thing is that no serious mac-user would ever stick his mobo in a boring beige box.

That's the difference: PC-Users are desperate for some class, mac-users just have it.

Dirk

you B*STRDS

[aye_eye_stabber]

if some mental f*ker did that to my performa 588 with its 33mhz LC040 and 40mb of S-L-O-W ram, i would cry. my eyes are watering already :(

At least make something useful!

[bsartist]

Man, if you absolutely must trash a perfectly good Mac, at least make something useful out of it.

Wait a sec...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quote/
Apple has some great things going for them. No doubt they have a killer OS and they put those OS's in nice boxes. Once you get past all of the interior decorator color schemes and lackluster hardware that Apple tries to pass off for PC competition, we find something that is a true gem.
End Quote/

Hold on sec let me get this straight. The only thing they don't like about Apple is the hardware. I thought the point of switching to apple was to use thier OS.

I have a hard time comprehending what's lackluster about apple's hardware.

You FIND a PC with a better system bus &... well you can't. I'll give the PC's thier day in the sun: better memory acces w/ DDR 1billon & 3 or whatever thier up to - I'm talking about all around system access . Apple's new system bus is just stupid fast.

http://www.apple.com/powermac/architecture.html

And those of you who complain about the G4 processor. Read this first then argue.

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/index.html

I have to admit I did it - i switched to a PC - I have a 1.2 GHZ T-bird. 512MB PC 2100 Ram - Radeon 7200 64MB DDR - 2 40 Gig hard drives @ 7200 rpm - Epox main board - top of the line at the time.

Ran Red Hat & Windows XP pro - dual boot.

I recently got one of the new dual 867's w/ a Radeon 9000 Pro. I now can develope in PHP or use the GIMP without having to re-boot. Hell I don't have to reboot to use office either. i've spent the last two weeks wondering why the hell i wasted my money on a PC.

Re:Wait a sec...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can develop in PHP and use the GIMP w/o rebooting too. It's not that difficult if you have a *nix machine for a desktop.

They say marijuana leads to other drugs.

[TwitchCHNO]

No it doesn't, it leads to fucking carpentry. ... Denis Leary

Re:They say marijuana leads to other drugs.

[bsartist]

... it leads to fucking carpentry.

Which leads to some really nasty splinters.

Not for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, he stripped out the shit hardware and replaced it fast parts. I would still be embarassed as hell to lug that thing into a LAN party.

Re:Not for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh.. Many folks would be embarassed to GO to a LAN party. I have nothing against gaming, I love it a lot. I play UT with co-workers all the time.
But never fool yourself into thinking that it is something that makes you cool.

Re:Not for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not so much that going to a lan party makes you cool or anything like that. If you are unable to understand that analogy, we can always resort to car analogies. Bringing anything thatlooks like a Mac to a Lan party would be similar to bringing a Bicycle to a drag race.

Big Whoop

[MyHair]

Call me again when they power it with a Tesla coil.

that was the worst..

[Anonymous Coward]

fucking article i have ever read. aRRGGHGHH

Understandable

[Zhe Mappel]

You'd wreck a Mac, too, if your adolescence consisted of stuffing computer cases with neon lights, writing earnest odes to each passing mhz bump from Intel, and listing the names of who manufactured your case fans and hard drive in your sig. Eventually, they'll discover real sex.

Now all they need is a leaked copy of Marklar...

[dpbsmith]

(... the top-secret
x86 version of OS X)...

Re:Now all they need is a leaked copy of Marklar..

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the one that will NEVER EVER RUN on a regualr PC? Yeah, that would be completely useless to them.
How can I make you monkeys understand this? Apple will never release an OS that you can load on a machine they didn't make. Not without emulation, anyway. If Apple goes to Intel, they will sell Intel Macs, and you will need an Intel Mac with Apple boot ROM to run any version of OS X. Get it? Now DROP IT.

Peecee in a Mac case

[Synergy2k4]

Blasphemy!

Beautiful ?

[l0wland]

If I compare my quicksilver G4 with this x86-casemod, the latter looks to me like a transvestite with a goatee and a low voice.

Sorry guys, it just ain't "the real thing"

Big Wallets

[bdaehlie]

I can't help but think what a frickin' waste of money... First by a mac that is expensive in the first place. Then throw most of it away, and buy relatively expensive PC crap for it. If you add that up and buy a faster PC (if that is what you want) with the money, I think your insanely fast system will be worth the crappier case.

Why??

[Tar-Palantir]

These guys need one of those awesome dual 1.25 Ghz G4's. Now that is speed. Why ruin a good Mac?

Granted, these guys are a bunch of idiots

[multiplexo]

but they are onto something. Doubts about their own masculinity aside Apple's cases could be a lot more interesting. Apple already has the case design and ergonomics down pat, as someone who has worked with pretty much every UNIX system in existence and who has forgotten how many white box PCs he has built I have to say that the only box that even remotely approaches the Apple in terms of ease of maintenance is the HP LT6000R server, which is unfortunately a real piece of crap.

But it would be cool if Apple would do some other colors. I like my silver Mac and I used to tote a clamshell iBook around but imagine how many boxes Apple could sell if they could come up with a means of allowing users to easily customize the case color. I'd love a black Mac with a bright red (or even neon-backlit) Apple logo on it. Or silver and navy blue, or black and green.

Re:Granted, these guys are a bunch of idiots

[guuyuk]

Try this...
http://www.appleskinz.com/

Done before

[Lxy]

I've seen a similar mod before, and it was posted on /.

Some kid decided that the handles on the G4 case would make a great LAN party box, easy to carry and such. Basically the G4 is just a funky ATX bx, as seen both in modding the G4 and building your own from shelf parts.

Re:Done before

[Cutriss]

That "kid" would be me. :) ...Formerly of SLCentral.com, which is where the article is (currently) hosted. I'm going to be migrating it to private hosting shortly, though.

Oh...and naturally, Kyle and Duckman offered no credit to those who had tread the path before.

I wasn't the first, but I honestly thought I was at the time, and I credited the places where I got info from to help with the conversion. Kyle's seen my system before, as he linked to our article.

Here's the URL if you're interested in reading it again. http://www.slcentral.com/articles/01/8/g4pc

Chicks dig my manly box

[illerd]

"Now if it just did not look like a chick's box..."

Man, it's one thing to associate your car with your masculinity, but your computer? It's dorky no matter which color your paint it. No chick is ever going to be impressed. She may make a comment like, "Wow, it's red! That's so cool!" but really she's thinking "Wow. Lots of time on his hands AND a strong sense of asthetics. Conclusion: gay dork." Why did they change it from grey to red? More color = more swishy, I say.

What I want to know..

[Suppafly]

Is how does one get one of these cases cheaply? Its not really feasible to buy a mac just to gut it for the cute case..

Re:What I want to know..

[Mr. Spleen]

To answer your quesition, I have no idea where you can get one *cheaply*. However, you should be able to order one at any Apple Authorized Service Center (AASC). Well, not any, but if you can find one that is cool, they'll order you a chassis/case assembly. Their cost will range from $117 for an early PCI Graphics G4 all the way up to $285.30 for a QuickSilver. (The chassis of the currently available G4s is $247.50). However, AASC markup will often drive that price much higher. Otherwise, you can just try eBay; they come up for auction there quite often.

Mr. Spleen

Re:What I want to know..

[Suppafly]

cool. thanks for the info.. im thinking ebay is the way to go.. or possibly some mac shop that has converted theirs to racks, but most places that have the space just rack the original case on the side..

Re:What I want to know..

[Mr. Spleen]

Yeah, eBay is probably the easiest way to go. I really doubt you'll find one from a mac shop that has converted to rack mounts. Another place you might try is a swap meet or yard sale. I once bought a supposedly dead iMac for $10 at a swap meet, and the only problem it had was a fried hard drive. A G4 that has some fatal problem but an undamaged case could probably be gotten for not too much in a similar situation.

Mr. Spleen

Art Supplies

[freerangegeek]

Honey, junior is out of paper for his art class project, can you yank our signed monet off the wall and take off the frame, I'm sure the canvas will work fine for his project.

Now if only...

[Anonymous Coward]

...they would replace the case with one that actually looked good, I might just buy one of these.

Earth to Geek, come in Geek...

[Anonymous Coward]

And you confuse reality with advertising. The only advantage the G4 has over the Athlon is the Altivec unit. But if you take a Pentium 4, for example, you have SSE2, which is similar to the Altivec (and runs faster). And very few programs actually make good use of the Altivec. AMD will add SSE2 support to the Opteron, BTW.

If you compare the MHz, the G4 is indeed much faster than a Pentium 4, and perhaps even slightly faster than an Athlon (5-10%). But the problem is, the G4 is still stuck at 1 GHz. Athlons now run at 2 GHz and P4s at 3 GHz. And, for each MHz, the G4 is definitely not 3 times faster than a P4. Memory and bus bandwidth are also much bigger in PCs, especially if you use RDRAM or dual-channel DDR333 / DDR400.

Digital Video Editing magazine ran some tests on After Effects some time ago. I submitted the link to Slashdot but apparently it wasn't considered relevant, so they never posted it. Lots of other sites did. You can find it here. You can also see plenty of Lightwave benchmarks here.

Apple is simply no loger competitive in markets that require top processing power (ex., rendering, video, scientific research). That doesn't mean Macs can't be good home computers (especially for non-techies), but there's no point in making such obviously false statements as "Macs are faster than PCs". It only makes Mac users sound like a bunch of fanatics.

Macs are not faster than PCs. But in most cases they don't need to be.

Re:Earth to Geek, come in Geek...

[Into The White]

Wrong. Altivec is far superior to SSE2. It is easier to write code for altivec, gcc3.1 has excellent altivec support (although still not as good as hand-coding), and altivec has more instructions than sse2. Yes the Motorola CPUs are slower than Pentium 4s for now, but when IBM begins supplying Apple with "G5" CPUs w/altivec, we'll see how the Pentiums compare then.