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PowerBook, Because Lives Are On The Line
WCityMike writes "Major Shawn Weed, an intelligence planner with the Third Infantry Division, eschewed his Panasonic Toughbook because it wasn't fast enough in processing giant satellite and reconnaissance images. He put in a requisition for and received a PowerBook G4, the only Apple currently being used in the entire Middle East theater. 'Frankly, lives are in the balance here, so the quicker I can get stuff done accurately, the better,' Weed says."
The article says it's been fine so far, but sooner or later the lack of military-grade durability is going to be a factor.
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Oddly, I'm going to attempt to explain this...
Most of the equipment that the Armed Services pay "too much" for aren't your run-of-the-mill items. It's not like they can run out to Home Depot and pick up a crapper capper.
We have tie hooks that are rated at 2 or 3 thousand pounds, yet are made of titanium, to keep weight down as much as possible.
Imagine designing that same item in your garage. How much would it cost if you had to make such item from scratch, with a guarantee that the item would work as intended, under such extreme circumstances? Factor in the engineering, labor work, logistics, and planning and see how much a "simple" item like a titanium tie-down hook (with a 2k weight rating & MTBF rate of 1000 flight hours) would cost.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
The system itself is fine, but I personally would not want literally mission critical apps running on OS X, nor would I want them on Windows. I would say that *nix (not apple's version) is a better solution as far as operating systems go. Ive seen OS X dump programs, become unresponsive temporarily, etc on powerbooks before and it happens a bit too much I think to actually perform extremely time-critical tasks on; atleast, without a backup.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Fortunately, Macs are damn near infinitely easier to figure out how to operate than PC's. Seriously, the chance that a rear eschelon intelligence officer is killed and some random soldier without the wits to launch Photoshop will take over for him is pretty slim. In the mean time, he's going to get his work done quickly enough to save lives (US soldiers and Iraqi innocents.) Any replacement qualified to interpret satallite imagry has their own equipment. In a pinch, anyone qualified to interpret satallite imagry is a little more capable with a computer than your average potato peeler. As a former US Army Ranger and RATT rig operator, I'm not comforted that your platform bigotry extends so far that it has you placing more importance on some tired two button mouse arguement than on people's lives.
Oh yes, and we also all know that benchmarks are the be all and end all of performance evaluation. Especially those benchmarks that conform to no known standard, and aren't terribly well documented.
Please, spare me.
Benchmarks can give you a general idea of how performande might compare if you used exactly the same programs, input files, OS configuration, network load, other running processes, etc...
What are the chances that the military uses Photoshop for their image processing? I'd think not very high (unless there's a series of photoshop plugins I am unaware of that will process an image looking for convoys of trucks, bunkers, and other such things that the military cares about satellite images for). If he is not using photoshop, then the benchmarks you're getting so excited about are meaningless.
MacBibble has shown us that a Macintosh can perform quite well on image processing, if you run optimized code.
Benchmarks are just that, benchmarks. If this guy finds that for his application a Macintosh is faster, then let him use a Macintosh.
I think what you've 'seen' is anecdotal.
Since we don't know exactly what his 'mission critical' tasks are, exactly, we have to take his word for why he chose a G4. It sounds like this guy already has reason to trust his choice. After all, it's not just the hardware nor just the software...it's the combination, and in this case, they are strictly made for each other. I know of no other examples that come close...
I've got an 867MHz PowerBook G4 I bought back in July 2002
Very interesting, since the first 867-MHz PowerBooks were released in November 2002. Or did you mean 800 MHz? (Hate to nitpick, but you did mention these details.)
As you say, you cannot always select what you consider the perfect tool for the job.
This case, however, is an exception, one of the times where Weed *could* select what he considered the perfect tool for his job.
You have to trust his judgement, since he's the one out in the desert doing his photo-manip stuff (probably), and as such, if his need for a PowerBook will let us win, and the military agrees, it's really out of our hands other than to backseat drive.
The issue here is that we're comparing a 1.8GHz (max) P4 to a 1.0GHz G4, where the speed delta is small enough that cache, ram, Altivec, and code optimization might make a difference. I mean, we don't know how fast the Toughbooks they can get, they may possibly get 1.3GHz P4s, or 1.2GHz P3s, in which case the performance/benefit analysis is much different than if they could get 3.0GHz P4s.
Also note, I think there's ram limitations; a G4 can get 1.0GB, I don't think the Toughbooks can. And a Toughbook actually costs more, to the public, than a G4.
Now, could he have gotten a Dell instead? Sure. However, he is also most comfortable with a Mac; he *knows* he can get his job done with the PowerBook-at this point then, we have to trust him that he is performing his soldierly duties, and performing them well.
GPL Deconstructed
Also, there are SOME projects that don't even have a budget so they don't show up on the radar screen, if you know what I mean.
The costs for these "other" projects are absorbed and hidden by other purchases in some cases.
This means that when they're paying $1,000 for a $20 hammer, they're only paying $20 for the hammer, and the rest is being used elsewhere.
$0.02 (CDN)
Most of the planet is up in arms about this invasion of Iraq and the declared intent by Washington to make no part of Baghdad safe (at the inevitable expense of untold numbers of citizens). And this trained killer says lives are "on the line"?
Correction: lives are about to be wasted, made trash, disposed of, terminated. Let's at least be honest about that much.