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New iMacs (and iPods)
Dilaudid writes "According to
this story at MacWorld Apple has just announced three new iMac models - all with Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme. More importantly there are new iPods too. Cool." The iMacs got a speed bump up to 1.25GHz, and the iPods were capacity-bumped up to 40GB.
Sure, they look cool, but the specs just aren't there for the $$.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
I have recently upgraded from a Mac 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM to a new G5 dual 2GHz with AGP 8X and PCI-X to help me at my freelance gig where I copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. On the G5 I spent about 20 minutes trying to install Adobe Arcobat 6. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, my iPod will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8MB of ram running MS Windows for Workgroups 3.11 is faster than this G5 dual 2GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
After the PowerMac G5, I'm not sure I'd ever want to buy an Apple with such a sluggish bus speed no matter how nice it was.
Its only cool if it runs the same os as the g4 towers!
in fact ALL the g4 towers for many months come preinstalled with Mac OS 9.2.2 as wells as OS X.
Why?
various http request loggers on massive sites shoe that os 9 is still more popular than os x!
thats wy apple paid engineers to get it workign again on all the g4 towers now sold in stores and on their web site.
its one of the main 7 "bullet point' features.
Steve jobs displayed a chart in his 2 hour demo in june that admitted that only 100,000 people in early january 2003 used os x at all.
and those were assumedly the developers!
100,000!
its in the video
but he said its finally at the halfway mark... 7 million os 9 and 7 million osx users this summer.
but countless applications only exist on os9, including many latency-critical audio VST plugins.
apple found out the hard way when sales plummeted in january when they pulled os 9.2.2 momentarily... and got hurt!
now os9 is on all the powerful g4 towers
i sure hope apple realizes these imacs could use os 9.2.2 as well.
(os 9.2.2 can issue 30,000 genuine different scsi io block requests per second through high end fibre-channel cards.... os x is so crappy it was rewritten 9the scsi) three times and still is only 25% of that speed due to massive overhead and bloat.
plus the os9 has timeouts honored for each io, and the osx does not typically.
and os9 can have over 10,000 pending ios issued from interrupt level, in fact, and completed in pci interrupts if needed, and osx only allows about 64 ios pending.
osx is a slow ass toy compared to the low latency of os9 and its ability to run modern "gigasamplers'
a gigasampler stores thousnads of notes digitally on hard drives and loads only a little bit of the notes attacks into about a gig of ram, but has 100 gigabytes of audio notes on hard drives and issues thousands of time critical head seeks per second.
and it sucks on pokey slow osx iokit.
(its not freebsd's fault, nor mach 3 fault, its iokit from apple's fault)
i sure hope apple notices that people want os9 as all the many web-click survey sites indicate.
fule! they runz lunixz th3y R l33t j00 r lamers micro$oft weenie lamer weenie.
What the... holy fuck, I think I just got attacked by a Slashdot brain slug. Get it off! Get it off!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
What does Father O'day have to say about this? Anyone know?
My imac screen cracked along the frame when I moved it. Just gripped it a little too hard to turn it and crack! Not even a pinch, really. I've seen lexmark optra laser printers with more durable bodyshells.
Don't beleive me? Heres my dmesg from my new 17" 1.25 Ghz iMac.
Mac OS X version 10.2.7 (Jaguar pro for Imac G4) (gcc version 3.2.2 (Compiled with Xserve!)) #1 Fri Mar 14 15:08:06 EST 2003
Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=darwin ro root=307 devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi acpi=off
ide_setup: hdc=ide-scsi
Found and enabled local APIC!
Initializing CPU#0
Detected 1256.934 MHz IBM PowerPC G4(r) processor.
Calibrating delay loop... 255510.02 BogoMIPS
Hardware.
0 PCI slots
160Gb hard drive
17" certified Apple AGP display
1 Button apple pro mouse.
One apple keyboard
One Piece of goat shit.
Checking iBIOS Checksum. OK 5949433!32
Checking length of users phallus.... 163209 MicroMetres.
Booting Aqua.......
Error in Aqua.exe, please download patch at http://www.goatse.cx/contrib/hello.mpg
Report bugs to jobs@apple.com
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.
As a avidly practicising homosexual (I dare say that I could be considered flamingly so...) I must strongly protest your implication that I am a Mac user! Choose your bon-mots more wisely in the future, sir, or you may very well be prosecuted for hate-speach! Just a friendly warning.
Yrs,
Nancy Flaming Poofter, (Mr.)
YOU FUCKERZ! I hate every last one of you butt smoking bukkake slurping mother fucking faggortz. You are simply out of your league when you try to aspire to being as 31337 as I am. If anyone mods this down, you will forever be a pussy who won't get any action for individuals of your desired sexual preference. So why don't you just shut the fuck up and die? Don't you fucking dare to mod me down!!!
Now onto the serious but admitedly off topic stuff:
Why is it that when someone posts something like I just did above, the immediate knee-jerk reaction of moderators is to mod it down instead of responding to it? Sure, it's off-topic, but it does warrant some kind of response. After all the whole idea of "please don't feed the trolls" is just ludicrous! Sometimes, by responding to well crafted trolls like the one above, it's possible to get some very interesting reactions out of people and find out a little bit more about ourselves as a community. The Slashdot community is slowly having the life extinguished from it by moderators who do their best to "sanitize" Slashdot into some kind of boring web publication instead of what it really excels at: being a web community.
The thing that has irked me the most since I've been a Slashdot reader (since 1997) is that Slashdot has become less humorous and obscure. What I mean by obscure is the brand of humor, not the notoriety of Slashdot. This is a sad thing since one of the most attractive features of Slashdot used to be that it was a community of people who were just "slightly off" from the rest of society. The people who have become members as of late, are not that brand of person and definitely should not dictate the way that Slashdot is run. In fact, I would aruge that the original "slightly off" members should be the ones who dictate how the new members interact with the site. After all, this is OUR site. Not the AOHell, MSN, Microsoftian "computer know it all" masses that have been polluting the culture since the rise of the dotbombs. Face it, if you can't deal with a CLI and you got your first computer post-1980, then you don't belong on Slashdot.
Now... the challenge:
Who will respond to this valliant post that dares to question the current status quo of Slashdot which, frankly, sucks? I want intelligent responses. Not just stupid "fuck off" or "I AM SHITTING CORN IN YOUR FORESKIN" types of responses. No Goatse responses either. (Although we must all hail the power of the Giver and the Receiver).
Who inherited enough, you mean? Or slept with the right person? Not the same as earning.
Hah, hah...Again, a "/."-er's biting wit and insight sets me straight...Cutting so close to the bone...Ouch!
Is it 'earning' if I had to kill the person I inherited my treasure chest of gold from? What if I slept with that leprechan that I met at the end of the rainbow -- if I got paid by him that doesn't make me gay, right?
I just figured you'd have some experience 'earning' your money that way and all...Come to think of it, I bet your idea of work is pumping your parents for more allowance.
Okay, okay...Move along...nothing to read here...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
...yet I've NEVER seen one mentioned on Slashdot.
Why? The only possible answers: 1-Apple pays you or 2-You are some kind of nutcase zealot