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The Answer to iMac Envy: NEC's Z1
Unit3 writes "Finally a real competitor to the iMac from a Wintel manufacturer: NEC's Z1 appears to not only outpower the iMac, but includes some very nice design and expandbility ideas that most of the iMac ripoffs these days are missing. "
At $2500 I'm not quite sure that its an iMac competitor, but
it has several other features that are quite tasty. Course it
has to run Linux... I still think I'd prefer a VAIO.
Whether Mac Users want to admit it or not, there are a lot of reasons to hate Apple, and MacOS in general.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
I'm not sure I agree there. Floppy disks *must* die, and they aren't going to die until companies kill them dead.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
"NEC" is just another word for "Packard Bell", at least in the USA.
In my experience their stuff has to be near the bottom in terms of product quality. And their computer is a 20th Anniversary Macintosh ripoff (Which itself is a ripoff of a Bose? CD player).
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
So what's the difference between Win98 and MacOS, except the former is slower and the latter crashes more?
1 cycle/instruction throughput? You're a bit behind the times on CPU technology...
G3s blow the doors off of PIIIs at comparable clock rates. I've noticed no appreciable performance difference between my Rev.A iMac (233 MHz) and my 450 MHz PIII Dell Optiplex GX1P. The only plus on the Dell's side is a larger monitor.
anyone who considers that horendous pile of bits on a windows machine to be a "telnet Client" should have their head examined...
its terrible, it barely functions at all and its huge (ever taken a look at the size of the executable)
built in indeed
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Do you really think 90% of slashdot's readers HAVE significant others?
;)
Of course computers, a few months ago, didn't have things like USB Floppy drives instead of internal ones. USB is now a need, not a flashbang feature.
Being competitive on the desktop market has nothing to do with it.. LOADING/RUNNING on the desktop market does.
I wouldn't buy it.
If I want somthing like an iMac, i'd get a f'n iMac, or powerMac.
If i want something like a PC, i'd get an f'n PC
If i want my PC to look like a Mac, I'd get a fancy case / monitor and/or put the box under the desk.
If they really want to compete with the iMac's they should:
Make it compatable with iMacs
Make it cheaper (alot cheaper).
not give it a similar case to an iMac.
Anyone know of any Liquid Crystal on Silicon(e?) products on their way or already on the marked?
Both it and the Z-1 are sexy, slim machines. I like the idea of not cluttering my desktop. I think it's going to be the trend if it isn't already. Our lives are cluttered and this small-footprint machine is a metaphor for the simpler live styles we need.
CmdrTaco wrote that he'd rather have a VAIO. I suppose that I would, too, because I've had a VAIO PCG-505G, the first of the VAIO super thin laptops, for over a year and it's performed flawlessly. For most of that year, it's been running NetBSD. I'm inclined to buy another VAIO when I have the opportunity. Other people complain about Sony's support policies but I haven't needed support from Sony yet. My 505 just works.
I could be wrong but if the ports were all independent of each other then they would all have their own irq, which is just way too much. I am thinking they are all sharing resources.
The 20th aniv. mac has (as already noted) Bosre speakers. It looks, a bit, like several models of Bang&olufson CD players. A bit, however. To say it was a ripoff would be akin to calling the imac an sgi ripoff because they both use colored plastics. Sure, the same inventiveness in design exists (and a sort of parodic modern sleekness), but, beyond that, similarities end.
--Andrew Grossman
grossdog@dartmouth.edu
Yea, true...I use a iomega zip for carrying files around...after all how many files now days will even fit on a floppy? I boot on cdrom on my intel and a alphastation for updates if I wish...so as you said the floppy is a useless back compatibility issue. Like the 5-1/4" floppy the 3-1/2" floppy is on its way to the graveyard,
It isn't necessarily a given that it outperforms an iMac. The web site just indicates that it has a PIII processor, which isn't much of a powerhouse. I've no doubts that the 333MHz iMacs on the market today can hold their own against it, even if it is a 500MHz PIII.
That is so funny that your answer to iMac envy looks just like another two year old Macintosh!
Bah... my Netwinder's still cooler than this or the Profile. It isn't made by Packard Bell, and it comes pre-installed with Linux :)
For the weirdnesses and instabilities - I haven't had any of them (knock on wood). How long ago did you get that F150? I'm extremely happy with the 505TX's performance running Linux, and would clobber the Win98 partition if I didn't have to run some programs under it...
--bdj
Buy an imac. duh.
Reasons:
1. They're cheap. My office just picked up a first generation one for $600 even. Not bad.
2. If you're inclined, they run linux very well. Why force yourself to buy intel and pay MS taxes? PPCs run linux and, telnetting in, I'd bet $$$ that no one could tell the difference (though it might be a little faster).
3. It runs MacOS. At the very least, it's no worse than windows and has the advantage of not ginving money to MS or boosting their market share. One could go so far as to claim that it's a great productivity OS, but, if that's not your cup of tea, see #3. Also, MacOS is somewhat more robust than in the past. I have a month of uptime on this computer. Not bad for an OS previously reknowned for some spectacular crashing.
4. They're designed well. Little desktop realestate, easy to set up, and work well as smart terminals. Because they're so cheap, we bought one for everyone in the office. 10 mins of setup time each, and they work great.
To summarize, if you're a linux geek and have imac envy, you're an idiot or 'platform bigot.'
--Andrew Grossman
grossdog@dartmouth.edu
Original?
*snort*
It looks like a 20th Anniversary Mac.
And it's from Packaged Hell? No thanks.
The new MS Natural USB keyboard makes all my OS/2 Warp 4 machines have trap errors.
"Designed for MS " Its proprietary shit so I personally won't buy one. (We use them for ergonomically challenged people where I work)
Amazingly enough, this never happened with the old MS Natural keyboards... this is a new "feature".
Sure, they're outdated, but the point is Apple didn't replace them with anything. iMacs ship with no writable media at all, and you know there are thousands of owners who didn't want to bother to back up at 26Kbps to the 5MB account they may or may not be lucky enough to have who are going to be screwed sooner or later.
another problem: you can't kick it around like iMacs. iMacs roll. (they don't rock, but they roll.)
For the money, I'd buy separates and get Linux hardware compatibility, more memory, more hard drive and not have to pay Microsoft for all that software. If it's PC technology anyway, why not make it the standard platform, expandability and non-monopoly support. Assemble it yourself. You might even save a few sheckles.
If you want cool looking, proprietary and Linux compatibility, there's the NetWinder or Cobalt Qube. That way you are supporting companies which support the Linux effort, too. IMHO.
eeuurkk !
I don't want that !
Think Big STI ! (Elvis Graton 2)
resilience is futile
U'd think for a big company making computers that they'ed have a decent server. It's kinda like finding a web-designer's homepage that looks is if it was made by M$ FrontPage.
It's been 3 mins and i still can't get a good look at it.
I can't remember the last time I used a floppy. Can you? I don't see a lack of floppy as a mistake; I see it as a company trying to put a tired old technology to rest, where it belongs.
IIS of course.
Check out Netcraft for cases like this:
http://www.netcraft.com
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http://www.wholepop.com/
Whole Pop Magazine Online - Pop Culture
http://www.wholepop.com/
Whole Pop Magazine Online - Pop Culture
http://www.gateway.com/promotion
--
Netscape already does that in most cases (since long before IE was a wet dream in BG's eye), but is unable (or unwilling) to do layout past the first image without size tags. As mentioned elsewhere, javascript may also confuse it.
--
I hope I'm not misquoting this.
--
http://www.wholepop.com/
Whole Pop Magazine Online - Pop Culture
http://www.wholepop.com/
Whole Pop Magazine Online - Pop Culture
I must admit, *I* have an iMac, and here is what I think of it:
1) NO FLOPPIES thank god
2) easy to use. Yeah, its great to tinker with our favorite OS, but lets face it, MacOS is MUCH better than windows, and the hardware is fantastic!
3) performance: for the money, there is no comparison. My mac at home consistently does things twice as fast as my $2000 Dell GX1 that I use at work: and the Dell has twice the memory!
4)Coolness factor: everything about the iMac is cool: look, feel, the fact that Apple is trying to use only USB instead of serial, etc. If only more companies would be so daring.
Yeah, I've had downsides to it, too. Mac isn't perfect, and certianly the iMac isn't going to blow the doors off of a well-tuned $2000 Dell GX1 with linux, etc. etc (yadda yadda). BUT I will say that it is _/THE BEST COMPUTING EXPERIENCE I HAVE EVER HAD/_
So don't be so rough on the iMac: for most people it is a dream come true.... and Most people down Macs and apple through sheer ignorance, not knowledge.
BTW: While the Nick says Anonymous COward, that is only becuase this d***d windows machine (you know, the fantastic $2000 Dell GX1 mentioned above?) isn't being kind: there must be some screwed up registry entry that isn't allowing cookies or something, 'cause I have everything set right......
I'm on one of the blue PowerMacs. The box on the QuickCam Pro said it'd work with USB macs and PC's, so I thought I'd plunk down the dough for it (My brother had an older serial QuickCam which worked great).
It sucked big nuts. The video would show up way too bright even after I tried to adjust it manually. Also, the camera itself would get REALLY warm before the video signal would die. I tried testing it on a PC to see if it was a driver problem. On Windows, it worked a little better, but would still crap out after a couple minutes.
What I'm wondering now is... was it just an isolated defect of this one QuickCam, or is it a design flaw that affects all USB QuickCams? I'm gonna experiment some more after I get my USB hub from Outpost.com, and then decide whether to get my money back or exchange it for a new one...
USB isn't likely to start to control the peripheral[sp] market until 5 or so years down the road.
It sort of like moving the phone lines over to a fully digitized packet system.
They're both going to happen, because they're both more effiecient and more scalable than our current systems, and engineers love them, but there's going to be a lot kinks and trouble switching over - and that's sure to take some time.
true, i think it will go the way of the 20th anniversary mac, just being a collector's piece. compaq and monorail tried some inovative desigans and they FAILED. i think that the imac worked b/c it is a mac and people expect it to be different
good thing, that we are now only at "G"
Hmm...I'll admit that it's kinda bare-bones, but check the following (the first is from the retail Win98 upgrade, the second is from Slackware 3.6):
C:\WINDOWS>dir telnet.exe
- ---------- /bin/telnet /bin/telnet
Volume in drive C is BOOT
Volume Serial Number is 1D75-07E2
Directory of C:\WINDOWS
TELNET EXE 77,824 05-11-98 8:01p TELNET.EXE
1 file(s) 77,824 bytes
0 dir(s) 1,890.10 MB free
-------------------------------------------------
chakotay:~> ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root bin 73456 Jan 27 20:19
There's not that much of a difference between them in size or functionality. (For a better telnet client for Win9x, you can download HyperTerminal Private Edition for free...I use it to log into the Linux box with an 80x50 window so I can read news with trn, sanity-check my web site with lynx, etc.)
(BTW, /. really ought to support the plaintext tag. It'd make the inclusion of stuff such as text-screen captures turn out properly. tt (a synonym for code) just doesn't cut it.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Looks pretty cool, too bad it's a Packard Bell...
Look at the bottom of the page. "©1999 Packard Bell NEC, Inc. All rights reserved." Packard Bell and NEC are one company now :-).
So NEC == PB.
\\'
Cooperative multitasking is nothing if not efficient - you'll never be in the middle of a kernel call, and the CPU doesn't have a lot of machine state or memory mappings to save and restore. What it lacks is robustness - it simply can't defend itself against bad code, and of course most code at the moment is pretty bad.
Four USB ports- now there's a decent idea. It might actually take more than a day to outgrow that and have to spring for a hub. Of course, we'll have to wait for the new kernel to really get it going, but...
Posted by The Incredible Mr. Limpett:
Does anyone remember those Monorail "all in one" systems that came out a few years ago? (I think it was called Monorail...)
Looked JUST like this. I even saw one in use a couple of places (including a hardware store/UHaul center).
Umm.. yeah, but the machine has that new copper technology and the numbers are from IBM.
Their point was that a 333mhz iMac could beat a 500Mhz PIII. If a 466mhz PowerPC with copper interconnects matches a 500Mhz PIII, what do you think an iMac can do?
I've only seen one benchmark that has been used to compare the two chipsets when Apple wins: Bytemark....
I don't see why this is an Imac competitor...
It may have the similar features and a cool look, but cool looking boxes have been available for a while from many sources.
Besides, of course it outpowers the iMac...it comes out months after!!!
"Code free or die!"
CPU performance is improving much faster than that of affordable memory. I've been wondering how long until CISC (which effectively compresses the instruction stream in fairly clever ways) instruction decode can pay for itself in not requiring ludicrous memory bandwidth to keep the pipelines from stalling.
yep. the CDROM standard has a extension whereby you can boot most machines from the CD drive or write a bootable floppy to a CD writable disk.
This site is already s..............l............o................w. I wonder what they are running.
you obviously havent come across the zip drives famed Click of Death. if your ZIP CLOD's youre toast.
the 20th Anniversary Macintosh! I always wondered what Apple did with the ones they couldn't sell...
I discussed some of this with the guy that works at a local computer store, and he got the motherboard to run by connecting a battery (via wires) to the outside of the Real Time Clock. The problem is that you can't cut away the plastic case to get to the battery, because you'd be cutting away the RTC, since the battery is inside the RTC. As for leaving it permanently connected to the outside of the RTC, he said that it would be possible for the battery to explode.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yeah, and even with a lot of RAM and some nice cheap, fast CPU, Netscape is still known to CRAWL and suck memory like.. well.. I'll avoid the Lewinsky jokes (Damn those VoodooExtreme fools, they get to make ALL the Lewinksky cracks). Anyway, the point is that the program itself is bloatware. A cure COULD be a hideous amount of CPU/RAM but why the hell should I have to crank my system for one single program? This isn't Windows folks! Cheap/Old/GOOD Hardware forever!
i let netscape try to load it for rather a long while and finally decided screw it. when i hit stop, i just got a grey page saying transfer interrupted. so being curious, i go to "view page source" and the page's html had loaded in its entirety. now call me old-fashioned, but i think if netscape was able to load all of the page source, it should be able to draw the page, maybe with a few graphix missing...
but nope, netscape was unable to draw even a small semblance of a page. grrr... and i'm on ethernet connected to a T3...
Did you catch the slogan? "The Evolution of the Computer Ends With Z". Dopey.
It's nice to see flat desktops beginning to trickle into the market but just like what happened with iMac Apple has already set the benchmark - the design to beat. Specs are improved every month, or day, but tasteful design will never become outdated.
_ home.html
The 20th Anniversary Mac was released in '97 but it can be upgraded to the latest G3, and soon G4 processors. Plug in a 10/100 ethernet card in the pseudo-PCI slot (CommSlot II) and use the single PCI expansion slot for a Firewire card and you've got the fastest, coolest system in your state. If someone comes up with a combo Firewire-USB card your expansion options are nearly unlimited. And the sound system designed by Bose... sheer bliss!
Right now you can run either Mac OS or LinuxPPC on it, and perhaps Darwin (the open version of Mac OS X) sometime next year. And it will never be polluted by Windows 'cause it runs on PowerPC.
See for yourselves:
http://www.cogent.net/~fefc/twentieth/twentieth
Move along, there's nothing to see here...
I also have a VAIO, but the modem that comes with it works perfectly under Linux.
It might be that they have different cards in Europe, but I was even surprised that it worked without any setup under COL.
Gateway's been offering a cool "slim" computer like this in Japan for a while already and is getting ready to introduce it in the US. Here's the C|Net News article for more information. Prices will range from $1999 to $2299, which is a little cheaper than the NEC and I think overall, it's probably a better computer coming from Gateway. Personally, I like how they fit the stuff in the side. "Cool" computers come and go and the NEC one doesn't seem to solve too many problems that exist.
My US$.02
Seriously, baby, me son just wanted the groovy thing, so I plopped down the bucks for the 333 Blueberry and bob's your uncle!
Dreamy case, 96MB RAM, USB till the cows stop shagging.
Not bad.
Will in Seattle
Will in Seattle
They are using IIS 4.0:
"HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 23:07:56 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 87"
I wonder when corporations will get it through their skulls that IIS simply doesn't cut it.
Seriously, everyone is doing CD-RW or at least Zip.
If you're going to go for cool toy, then a floppy is just so 20th Century.
Will in Seattle
yes, my son's iMac is Blueberry, but he's 8, ok?
Will in Seattle
1) The iMac is better
2) The iMac sucks
3) Who needs a beautiful machine anyway?
I think /. readers need to become more attuned to machine beauty. Your box doesn't have to be an ugly piece of crap.
What the iMac (and even more profoundly, the 20th Century Mac, which as one reader pointed out is the obvious inspiration for the Z1) did is break out of the mold for consumer boxes, for the first time making the machine something you wouldn't necessarily want to hide under the desk.
Other machines, like the sony VAIO slimline and my personal favorite the stunning Rock City, have made similar design efforts, but with the iMac, Apple made it commercially viable.
The only downside I can see is really crappy upgradeability on this box. It (and the VAIO) use PC card slots. No TNT-2's (or -3's...) to upgrade the damn thing's Q3 performance.
For that reason, the Rock City, which takes standard ATX motherboards, still has to take the cake...
\
- Keyboard. They don't show the keyboard in any closeup pictures, so you can't tell if it's any good on layout. They're not descriptive at all about the tactile feedback on the keyboard, so chances are good (with today's keyboard market) that it's crap.
- DVD decoding. They don't say anything about hardware MPEG decoding for the DVD-ROM drive. I recently got an IBM laptop with a DVD-ROM drive and I didn't know to look for MPEG decoding. So I got an unpleasant surprise when I went to play a DVD movie and it was... not too great an image. I suppose this is irrelevant to people who run Linux and choose not to show DVDs at all.
Basically, this looks like a relatively cheap laptop packaged as a desktop PC. It's been tried before (remember the "PS/2e"?) and it comes nowhere near touching the iMac for what it's good for. They should have just used a CRT.Additionally, they don't mention a PS/2 keyboard port, which implies to me that any replacement keyboard you put on the thing has to be a USB jobbie. I've never seen a good USB keyboard. If anyone's seen one, I'd like to hear about it.
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
If they realy want to compete with iMac's they should make some darn emulation software for it.
These lots of stuff so u can run M$ on Mac's but nothing at all decent for running Mac stuff or even just a simple file system for PC's (well, i can find any).
Who cares u say... Well u might not want to run any Mac software on ur PC seen as u can already get it, but if ur in the computer graphics business then everything needs to be in Mac format (for what reasons i don't know).
So unless u like sending 5-50mb files through e-mail, u have to get a Mac.
IMHO
A bold announcement. Mac user comes out of the closet as an AC.
I'm typing this on a rev. A iMac. I feel cleansed.
Now instead of a crappy integrated all in one thing, why don't people just make standard cases that look nice. Doesn't have to be cute, just cool. The SGI visual PC cases are elegant, and much nicer looking than the iMac which looks kinda cheaply built. Secondly many tests have been made and power PCs are markedly slower for floating point than PCs. Its a fact of life, the PPC 750 (AKA G3) is based on the old PPC 603. The 603 had good integer performance but crappy floating point. the G4 will be based 604 which has much better floating point. Lastly, MacOS is worse than windows. Bad memory management, bad multitasking, annoying interface (an app should not take over the whole screen! ie. The menubar at the top), bad performance, late OpenGL implementation.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
When are you folks gonna get it once and forever? Proprietory closed technology sucks.
Forget Zip, use CD-RW. It's open, it's the future.
The 80s are over.
From what I hear the problem that the QC Pro's draw too much voltage. That or they're on the absolute borderline of the USB spec. Depends on who you talk to, obviously.
;)
Either way the result is that some USB root hubs may not provide enough power for the QC Pro. But through the miracle of electronics still manages to operate for a short time (similar to how some US appliances have trouble operating in Japan, which is 110v).
Those already providing power to other devices will obviously be harder hit, which definately includes the new Mac line - evidently the built-in hub in the keyboard draws enough voltage to cause trouble in this instance.
Basically I caution you to be careful when buying a hub. Most of the cheap hubs out there are low-power (aka they don't provide power to USB devices), which obviously will not solve your problem.
FWIW, I paid $40 for an Interex USBView 4-port hub from Buy.com last week (minus $10 thanks to an online coupon), it has realtime indicators for both bandwidth and power. And besides, it's got a cool blue LED!
Moof!
I would suspect that a lot of the new USB products have been brought about by the iMac. Although, I'm not saying that they wouldn't have come out, but the peripheral makers were given a group of users that the only way that they could upgrade was with USB. I don't think many PC users would buy a USB hard drive (with 1.5MB/sec or less transfer rates? no way).
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Posted by ChristianC:
you may be able to use emacs, gimp and apache when the unix-like Mac OS X comes out
>...well, suffice to say that despite all the iMac's comparisons to the VW beetle, within their
>respective industries they would be absolute opposites.
Not if compared to the New Beetle..
That thing gives new meaning to the word "overpriced"!
It comes with a pIII... not the best CPU (i'm holding out for the AMD K7... slot A, 200mhz bus speed.. truely superior to any of Intel's kiddie toys) And it runs WinblowZ 98.. Yeah, it'll run Linux alright.. almost right out of the box.. the video hardware might not totally be supported yet, but by the time it comes out, it probably will be.
Someone said something that it's Packard Bell?? Are you smoking crack? NEC != PB!!! get it right, dumbass! >#)
Whenever I need to move source code from (or to) non-networked places, :-)
when I want to boot after Windows erased my MBR,
when I am in school and they say: "you must back up on a floppy"
Though I use ZIP drives to transfer actual data,
I can't rely on it, until most computers will have one,
and for small text files, what's the point?
---
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I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
I can't see why a user who builds his own PC and probably knows how/what the not-so-mysterious machine would NEED an USB port at all? Keyboard, mouse...nah. Both work just as well or even better using more "traditional" ports (keeping in mind the slow sample rate for a serial mouse however, but a PS/2 mouse is already much better). And concerning all those new fancy USB widgets like cameras, scanners, and such...why not use a much more powerful SCSI system??
I'm still waiting for the day I personally need to walk to a local store and pay a double price for a USB keyb or mouse..or screen.
harri.koskinen@cc.tut.fi
if you are spending $2K - $3K you should get a laptop, which will have nearly identical features to the GateWay slim-whatchamajiggy or the NEC Z1, *plus* it will be portable.
What a joke, these box makers are essentially taking a laptop and loading it down with so much extruded plastic that it isn't portable anymore, but hey, it looks ''futuristic''.
I can take my Linux powered laptop (LinuxPPC on PowerBook G3) with me *everywhere* I go and hack away. Would work equally as well with a x86 laptop.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Yeah, but the stupidity of Apple IS present which is at least as big as (if not bigger than) that of MS.
Now EVIL is another story...
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
No PIII at any current MHz rating can outpower a 333MHz iMac. Make it with a PIII Xeon chip and then we can talk about similar horsepower. Too bad about the $5000 pricetag that machine would have.
Here you can find another one: http://www.mitac.com/micweb/index.html
Check out the Mitac Avenia, it's pretty cool. I once sent them and email and asked if it worked with Linux. Of course they could not promise that. But they did say that my email had reminded them of Linux's increasing popularity and that they would consider this in their next release.
Well, we'll see about that. I'm not yet in a need for a new computer right now, my good old K5-system is still doing a good job. But I do like the idea of these kinds of PC:s, if they only could make them in black too...
They all share the bandwidth- and voltage too- depending on the design of the usb internals, you may *have* to get a hub anyways- a good example are those usb quickcams- they suck so much juice they can make your mouse/kb not work on macs...
they share something like 2.1 or 1.2 megabits/sec...
I can't remember the last time I used a floppy. Can you?
Yesterday. I'm sorry you don't like floppy disks, but for me they're indispensable, why should I have to spend $99 on a zip drive, and $14 on each disk when all I need to store on them is under 1mb of data? Sure there are situations where I think zip disks or CD-RWs are better, but for me, all I've ever needed is a floppy drive and around 25 floppies (total cost $30)
-Ted
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Does Rock City sell computers? Or just photos of women in short dresses standing next to wind machines?
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
All the curved plastic in the world isn't going to make me buy a computer from a company that thinks that S3 will give you 'intense gaming' and thinks that Age of Empires is the 'latest in realtime strategy.'
The Problem with FPC (Flat Panel Comuters) is that most vendors builds a Mac-a-like, with the monitor and computer welded together. That's the main problem with NECs FPC. We've used Multiqs here for awhile and it works great, and just enough design for my taste. :-)
Multiqs homepage
The computers....
Not talking about the design of the beast, which is a copy of the Apple Spartacus (20th anniversary one), but about compatibility...
I'm a graphic designer and in my company we use both PCs and MACs, without any compatibility problems. For the graphic files, Photoshop, Illustartor etc. files are the same on both platforms, and I can read and write Mac zip disks, floppies, HDs thanx to a little piece of shareware called TransMac ($64). So your argument goes ploof on that one.
And, as a PC user, I also understand why ppl use Mac in the graphic industry... Because it all started with Mac! 10 years ago, everyting was done on Mac simply because PCs were still discovering how to display more than 16 colours at once AND were as easy to use as they are today. It was also already super easy to put them in a LAN cofiguration, which can still be tricky with Windoze...
At the moment, I'm using NT (yes, I know) for all the graphics I do, but seeing how fast the G3's are, and looking forward the new Mac OS, I might consider a little Mac training.
Unfortunately, Linux still hasn't reached a user-friendl state that will allow artists without computer knowledge to do whatever they want without undergoing a computer training.
Now you know!
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
??????
...except for playing Unreal of course ;)
Im' sorry but THERE ARE telnet applications on the Mac !!!
And THERE ARE 2/3/4 buttons mouse for the Mac too.
Wake up !!! USB is on the iMac, you can use any of the USB mouse on the market !!!
Anyway, one button mouse is better for me, what's a 4 buttons mouse for ????
My favourite comments was:
Hrm, I have 8GB at the moment (on two drives); I could still use more!--
Oh, I thought. Cool Computer!
Then I read the specs: Just another PC-Clone and you even have to pay the M$...
BTW: What has ever happend to the Sony range of MIPS computer? ("NEWS")
1.4 works sufficiently with USB.
Sony has a desktop that looks like this (it has a console unit, but the basic flat panel styling is close to the Packard Hell's style). And Apple, of course, already built this when they released the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (Spartacus). And when, pray tell, did Spartacus ship? Oh, yeah - 1996.
SGI builds some cool looking stuff, but one thing about Apple - when it comes to design they tend to be _way_ ahead of the curve in the mainstream computer market. Wintel cloners (for good reason) are focused tightly on cost, and Apple doesn't need to obsess as much there - their main competition was the now defunct Mac cloners. And Apple's designs were probably at their most boring when they were squeezing the nickel until the buffalo shites against the cloners.
Think about some of their design "greatest hits", though:
The original Mac (and derivatives like the SE and Classic): Compact, friendly-looking, portable, quiet, and all-in one before the trend started (luggables like Compaq didn't count).
The Mac LC series chassis systems: About as small as a mainstream desktop has ever gotten.
The original Powerbooks (especially the 100): For the time, a much slicker looking system. The pivoting feet were pretty innovative then, and they still don't make many systems as small as the PowerBook 100 was almost 8 years ago.
The PowerBook Duo: The first of the Transformer notebooks and still (arguably) the best-executed. Motorized loading, VCR-style, of a very slick subnotebook that turned it into a conventional desktop.
Spartacus: Possibly the first desktop to have an integrated active matrix screen. And they're still serious eye candy.
The Wall Street G3 PowerBooks: Fast, great screens, and "wicked swoopy".
iMac: The first truly stylish consumer-level computer. Decent amount of stuff crammed into it, too, for the price - and to Apple's credit, they've been pretty aggressive about revving it upwards without raising the price at all.
The Blue&White G3s: The case pivots open - how can that not be cool?
I'd like to see Packard-Bell match _that_ track record...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I doubt very much that it is faster. The PPC has a severe speed advantage, even though the iMac only uses a 66Mhz Bus.
Cheers.
Cheers, Duncan
s/half of those/this
s/weenies/weenie
You didn't understand Timur Tabi correctly. I think most people starting off with computers right now only need an iMac, some good reasons being !Win, USB, easy initial setup, easy net config, portability, and looks. Errr..
"plus a unique hard drive peripheral upgrade connector"
Translation: plus a PROPRIETARY upgrade connector, not compatible with anything else on the planet.
I didn't notice - is this supposed to take the place of firewire? Whee.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
It looks just like the Monorail. Kinda neat, but no biggie.
Personally, I have a 17" monitor, MS Natural Keyboard, and a Logitech Trackman Marble hooked up to four -- yes four -- computers: My Linux box (what I'm using to write this), My MS-DOS/Win3.11 laptop (my main computer), My voicemail system, and my linux-based network gateway. One of these days I'll get around to hooking up a Win95 box to play with.
I'm using a OmniView switch box, of course. With something like the NEC, you need to make room for multiple keyboards, screens, mice, etc. to use multiple computers.
I see these as handy in places like the foyer to leave messages to housemates/spouses/kids, etc, or other household/general business tasks.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Geeze...RAM is cheap these days son! So is CPU.
Blar.
...when it was called the 20th Anniversary Macintosh.
What we might be seeing here is a new business model in the hardware industry.
Previously, as all wintel boxes were pretty much the same, profit margins had to be pretty low. Raise your price by $100, and the consumer will buy a similar box from someone else.
But with the iMac, the Z1, the Palm V, and the funky-looking prototypes that are coming out, manufacturers are giving consumers a reason to spend an extra $100: differently shaped plastic. Before, they only had "latest" and "fastest" to achieve the "wow" factor, but everyone else can sell the latest and fastest too. Only you can sell a case you've copyrighted. And, if I'm reading the Z1's specs right, you can bilk the hell out of the customer for it.
We might even be entering a time like the '50s of Big Iron. At the time most U.S. auto profit came out of large, overpriced cars that people didn't really need. If this _is_ the beginning of a trend of cute, chic, overpriced computers that people don't really need...
...well, suffice to say that despite all the iMac's comparisons to the VW beetle, within their respective industries they would be absolute opposites.
-crazy uncle dave
Yes, I think it's true.
Various Macintosh people reported that effect over a year ago in benchmark testing. Apparently nothing else has come of it.
N = Nippon = Japan
I think the point the original author was trying to make is:
Japan = small/cramped living spaces = people will appreciate the small size of this thing.
1) What the hell do you need a floppy drive for when you've got a ethernet connection?
2) What percentage of the things you want to transfer actually fit in 1.44 MBytes? Now, a 120MByte floppy, that might actually be usefull...
This is probably a little off topic, but I hate when people compare the PowerPC or G3 chip to an Intel chip "at the same mhz". Simple fact:
PowerPC == fully RISC
G3 == fully RISC
PII/PIII == CISC with specialized RISC instruction sets
It's like comparing a MIPS and PIII, it just doesnt work right. RISC is naturally faster than CISC at comparable clockspeeds simply because it doesnt use as much chip overhead to process, it uses a handful of small instruction sets rather than large variable length instruction sets. It's easier to read a paragraph composed of small short words than it is to read one that says the same thing with more colorful language.
As for cuddletech, cute needs to be powerful or people wont buy it. But it also has to be cheap so people can afford it. I like the iMac, it's a well designed machine that is very easy for a new users to get working with. For serious users who know whut they're doing an iMac probably isnt the best idea. But with the PC industry trying to copy the iMac's popularity they are missing the point. The iMac is cheap and cute. It's icons are cuter, it's boot screen is cuter, it's made to make you want to hug it, hence the name cuddletech. The Z1 probably wont catch on, Windows 98 isn't cute, it's expensive, and it has "cool factor" but no cute. I'm not going to buy one, I like beige boxes that I can tear apart and rebuild with as few proprietary parts as possible.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
OK, so this thing is basically made up of laptop components, with the keyboard separate instead of connected, right? Why doesn't anyone take it to the next step? They should make the "monitor" an actual laptop. Have the screen hinge fold backwards and have it stand up like a "V". This way, you get the compactness of this thing when you're at home, but without the normal cramped keyboard. Plus you can take it on the road if you need to.
Really.
It looks like a repackaged laptop minus portability.
Why not just get a laptop?
It's not a particularly cutting edge design, so it doesn't even have that going for it.
My assesment- it's not worth any more of my time.
Well, I'm a Mac user, and I'll admit it: my computer isn't perfect. Neither is my operating system. And Apple has certainly had its share of mistakes in the past (and probably the future).
But nothing's perfect, and I can say with certainty that despite their shortcomings, I love my operating system and the company that makes it. I have yet to see a wintel user that can say the same.
Well, the door was open...
I still think I'd prefer a VAIO.
.10 by now).
I'm typing this on a VAIO F150 running Red Hat 6.0, kernel 2.2.9 (yes, I know I should be running
This is what's wrong with my VAIO:
- Built in Winmodem - it hits high tranfer rates, up to 55kbytes/sec on download of compressed files (I've seen it) - BUT it sucks because the specs are closed, forcing me to use an extra modem when running Linux, and also, the winmodem *heats up the processor* (no kidding - the fan comes on high when a download is in progress).
- the advertised uptime on batteries is just a lie - you will get an hour at most off one battery. The power-hungery winmodem and big display just make this worse. **You will need that second battery*** (it fits into the floppy bay).
- the DSTN screen is a little iffy - it's nice and bright, but you get rectangular bleeding from bright colored regions across the whole screen, both horizontally and vertically
- the power management bios support is very questionable... it worked for a couple of days under Windows, then just started crashing after that. Under Linux, suspend/restart works the first time after booting, the 2nd time you'll die a horrible death from which only a hard power-down will get you back. Once I even had to pull the battery to bring it back to life.
- There is some strange interaction with LILO or kernel (I haven't isolated it yet) that causes root to fail to mount (100% repeatable) if LILO times out - to boot Linux you have to hit Tab, then enter.
- There are some very curious omissions in the bios setup, such as not being able to turn off the cute little sound it makes every time it boots (yes, you can turn the volume down, but you can't turn it off). You can't get rid of the "SONY" screen either, which hangs around far longer than necessary. Apparently, MS knows how to get rid of the bios preboot screens, because the annoying Windows preboot screen goes away after you add logo=0 to MSDOS.SYS and start/exit windows, or else the VAIO knows how to read the msdos.sys file (yikes!).
- No way in the bios to turn off pressure-sensitive mouse click emulation - this would be great if it worked reliably but the truth is it doesn't - you get a *lot* of spurious clicks, even when hardly touching the pad.
- The speakers really suck.
Um, that's about it with my gripes, the bottom line is, with a 300 MHz Pentium II processor (reported as a celeron by proc) it really kicks butt, recompiling the kernel in about 5 minutes. It has a nice, fullsize keyboard and a large bright screen (mine has 1 dead pixel, I'll have to talk to Sony about that before my warrantee expires). Now, if Sony would just do something about the warts - lose the winmodem, debug the power management, etc., I'd be a really happy camper.
(if someone from Sony is reading this, feel free to drop me a line at phillips (at) dowco (dot) com)
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
The iMac is a concept existing of low cost, al in one, easy to use computer wich happen to have cool looks. Making a cool looking PC still doesn't make it easy to use. You still have to spend weeks to configure it right. But hee... isn't that why geeks buy PC's :O)
Maybe you need QoS support to some degree on USB - clearly the bandwidth is somewhat limited when you put video or other time-sensitive traffic on it. Firewire (IEEE 1394) is meant to handle such traffic better. Also USB 2.0 will have a lot more bandwidth.
Since USB is somewhat like an Ethernet shared-medium segment in concept, you could perhaps use RSVP plus SBM (RSVP allocates bandwidth end to end, while SBM is the implementation for Ethernet subnets). This all seems rather heavyweight, and assumes you are running IP across USB, which is not how devices currently work.
A lighter-weight approach might be sensible - just have a mini QoS policy manager for USB that lets you allocate bandwidth and class of service (e.g. gold, silver, bronze, where gold gets to front of queues), with simple weighted-round-robin queuing (like CBQ, you get a guaranteed bandwidth for gold and silver but can burst beyond that). Then you just config this on one USB host so that (say) your video grabber gets X MBps of gold, and your keyboard/mouse get a very small amount of silver. This is basically the DiffServ model but would need implementing over USB.
The policy-based approach means that the user can decide whether video is more important than mouse input - for a video editor, it might be, whereas for general use, it might not.
Linux 2.2 has quite impressive queuing support which is already multiprotocol but I have no idea whether it makes sense in kernel terms to try to apply this to USB - probably only a very small subset of the full Linux-DiffServ stuff is required.
My company makes DiffServ focused policy-based network management tools - currently we don't support USB, but it would be cool to see this working!
For useful links, see www.orchestream.com (my company, see the Links page), http://www.qosforum.com QoS forum, check the About page), and http://lrcwww.epfl.ch/linux-diffserv/ (Linux-DiffServ).
Of course, for videoconferencing, you may well want to have the same QoS applied for a USB video camera across both USB and the IP session you are using for the videoconferencing app. This is where an RSVP and/or DiffServ approach makes sense, since they can span multiple technologies and you can just assign one QoS policy across IP, USB, and maybe FireWire etc. Really the simplest solution here is to give every USB and Firewire device its own IP stack, which is bound to happen eventually, and avoid having to port DiffServ/RSVP to different stacks.
Because fitting boot roms are more expensive and floppies are hard to find. Yes, I know, you can burn your owns, but for small numbers this is too expensive.
Eg: Our dorm's server has a floppy drive, no CD-ROM. How many times do we use the floppy? Not at all, we have only used it >1.5 years ago when we installed NetBSD on it. Every upgrade so far has been done via net only.
I have thought a while if I should buy a floppy for my little new personal server, installation has been done via "hard disc swapping". Well, it has one, only for the case that something breaks completly. So I don't have to screw the box in parts and examine the hard disc with another machine.
Today ethernet has substituted floppies. Only the PC industry doesn't know it yet. Make NICs standard, floppies optional and all BIOS netbootable!
I had those problems with the LS-120. Bought it for my machine (when it was just parts in a bag...) The guy said that to boot from it you had to load the drivers for your OS. Huh? This is a new machine, I try to explain, it has no OS yet.
Well, after a few minutes of trying to explain myself I just went and picked up a $10 floppy drive.
What part of that didn't I understand? Umm... I'm not sure. Probably the whole thing. Sorry, temporary case of blindness. But yeah, this is definitely good news!
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
The floppy drive in my Mac has been broken for over two years. To be honest, I don't really miss it at all. I don't really need it for anything- I back up all my files to tape (which is much more useful than anything for backups, since it holds 4GB+). Smaller files (i.e all of the documents that I create are backed up to a fileserver on the internet). Since Macs have never really had a problem with booting from a CD, installing MacOS releases has been a breeze.
:-)
Furthermore, the only thing that I use the floppy drive in my Intel box is for reloading Windows NT when it barfs (now that I have a BIOS that supports booting from the CDROM, I don't even need to do this anymore). I did use it once to install FreeBSD, but I've been downloading all of the patches over the net.
I guess the lesson here is that if you don't run windows, you don't need a floppy.
I have heard that when IIS4 gets bogged down, the first thing it does is stops serving to Netscape browsers (all non-IE browsers to be more specific).
/.ed and the IE browswer would get the bandwidth... the NS browswer wouldn't.
I don't know if it's true.. but I have had the experience of trying to load a page from NS and IE at the same exact time using the same connection to a site that has been
If you click 'reload' on the Netscape browser 4 times, it seems to bypass this.
Anyone know any info that would validate this? I have a hard time believing it would be possible... but as I said, from my experience it seems to be the case.
--SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
I'm a Mac dude (Powerbook G3, PowerCenter Pro 210) but I have to use an NT Intel machine at work. I do lot's of heavy duty data crunching using my own custom C programs. When I'm home on the weekends, I bring the Jaz drive home, compile the programs on the Mac, and do my data crunching at home.
Out of curiosity, I threw some timers on a couple of my programs and tested them on the G3 and NT machine. My conclusion is similar to oft published photoshop tests: a G3 chip is 35% faster than a PII/III at the same mhz. That is, a 400mhz G3 is roughly equivalent to a 550mhz PIII.
So yes, the iMacs are fast, but the old saying that the original 233mhz iMacs were twice as fast (on average) as a 400mhz PII was complete hogwash. The 333mhz iMacs are roughly equivalent to 450 mhz PII/III's.
argh... i can't get to the site..
--
probably wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't like
a meg of gif on the main page.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
argh... i can't get to the site.. I hate it when this happens ;)
--
Im so sick of winmodems, I can just imagine that this thing is crippled with one.
There really should be a way for us to put pressure against those things.
Its embarrasing to have to tell friends and family that they cant use linux to do ppp because they have a winmodem and linux doesn't support that. (I know its not linux's fault)
I had to vent, anyway.. Is it a winmodem?
I agree it's a nice looking machine, but how likely is it to be able to run Linux? I would imagine that it has a hardware design similar to a laptop, and although Linux runs on many laptops, aren't there ocasionally problems getting Linux (or XFree86) to run on them? I noticed also that it has USB ports. Does Linux currently have support for USB? BTW, this computer (plus one from Gateway and another from SGI) were featured in this morning's NY Time's circuits section.
..
You are glossing over the advantages of a CISC.
Though a RISC processor doesn't have to deal with a wide array of instructions or variable length instructions, it also has to preform many more operations to get the same results.
It's not all about "little words" vs. "big words"; it also has to do with bredth of vocabulary. A simplistic analogy would be the difference between saying "great" vs. "doubleplus good".
A single pipeline CPU running RISC would almost certainly be bested by a CISC machine. However, RISC does make pipelining a _lot_ easier; hence the advantage.
I am not saying CISC is better, but it is not as braindead an idea as you make it out to be. When it was designed it was a godsend.
Who the _hell_ would envy an iMac? They look like Jello, and have similar performance. They make good footrests, though....
Guess I missed the price, which puts it out of the range of machines in competition with the iMac. But with a design like that, I was sure that's what they were targeting.
Seems like for $2500 with that little expandability I don't know who they think is going to buy it, but oh well.
-- sudo.ca
Since Packard Bell purchased NEC I have not been able to take them seriously again. Several years in the business of selling (and taking returns) on Packard Bell computers has made me nervous about the company.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Well, anyhow, I'd love to get one of those, but:
;)
(a) Don't have an extra $2,500 lying around.
(b) Waiting for good DVD support for Linux.
Other than that, the RAM sounds like enough to run Redhat 6.0, VMWare and Windows '98 comfortably... The HD is a bit small for me, but I'd just install my old 6GB HD, I think that 15GB would be more than enough for me...
So who wants to give me one?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Even though I won't buy it, at least NEC is smart enough to put a floppy drive in it. Unlike Apple, who don't even care to add floppy drives in G3 towers. But just one question, how upgradable does NEC Z1 get?
Well, this looks pretty good, if you go for that whole oh-cool-it-looks-so-futuristic thing.
There was an article in the WSJ about this; they mentioned you can upgrade the screen to an 18-inch panel just by popping the old one out. (Costs $1800-2000, but that's another story)
An interesting idea, though the whole proprietary-hardware idea leaves a bit of a sour aftertaste. I guess if you want something as slick as the iMac, however, it's a necessary evil . . .
> Though a RISC processor doesn't have to deal with a wide array of instructions or variable length instructions, it also has to
:-)
:-).
> preform many more operations to get the same results.
Generally not true at all:
1. CISCs like x86 are 2 adress machines:
You all know, the x86 operates like this: A = A op B, all RISCs I know do A = B op C (sometimes even with an fourth op D). This make a lot of register swaps uneccessary (you often need the "old" A again).
For floating point the x86 is even worse: Stackorientated! This is so weird and stupid, that I don't dare to describe how it works. But this is the main reasons, x86 sucks so much in floating point.
2. RISCs have much more general purpose registers
On CISCs you have to do a lot of register swapping, storing into memory, fetching back etc. This can be a real pain, especially in loops.
3. Other built in goodies
I have coded on the ARM a lot in past (not so much in the last 2-3 years). The ARM has a really wonderfull instruction set (take this as an example):
a)
i) All operations are conditional, this will save you a *LOT* of jumps or branches.
ii) Instructions influence the condition only if flagged so. Makes i) even more usefull
b) Shifts: For quite a few operations you can shift one of the operators. Believe me, this is *very* usefull too! (You just to have to code the ARM and you will see the light!)
c) Wonderfull load/store instructions:
The ARM has two kinds of load/store instructions: Lists and single register:
i) With the lists operators you can do load or store any subset of the current visible ARM register set (there are more than one, wich saves you from storing registers if (say) an interrupt occurres) to an area in the memory. The pointer (an other register) can be manipulated (increased or decreased) before or after the memory transfer.
Very neat! I *LOVE* them.
ii) The single load/store work very similar, except that they load/store only a single register of course and that there are more options to manipulate the pointer (constant offsets, (shifted) register offsets, etc.)
d) Special (but usefull) opcodes: The ARM has an MLA RA,RB,RC,RD wich does RA=RB*RC+RD (And the multiplier of the StrongARM was more then 4 times faster than that of the Pentium when it rolled out!) BTW: The ARM had this years before MMX and all the hype about it.
Most of the "special" opcodes, x86 offers, are really not that usefull, eg. finding first bit set in a word. All these strange stuff nobody nearly ever needs make the Pentium so bloated (and CISC).
Thank God that the x86 will die in a few years!
CISC is dead, horray!
You know how there's a certain amount of bandwidth on USB ports? If your computer has 2 ports, are they bandwidth-independent of each other, or does heavy traffic on one affect the other?
Ok, that cinches it. This guy/gal likes unreal. I was actually agreeing with him/her for a minute. I think what TummyX was saying was that WinTel Machines have these features _Built in_ to the package.
Just for the record, I actually dig the iMac, but that stupid freaking round mouse really gets on my nerves, as well as the miniature keyboard. Other than that, It's pretty cool.
www.ajp.co.uk/neopc
Lots of laptop technology stuffed into a desktop-esque case.
The future may "end with Z" but it still doesn't compete in design with Apples' past. This beautiful gem was underpowered but the design is perfect.
Hey, Apple! Can I have one of these with an AltiVec enhanced G4 processor, Firewire and a 14+" flatpanel? I'd pay good money!
Not to mention prolly doesnt break as often...
And it runs Linux.. And it runs BeOS.. And it
runs all your favorite (or not so favorite) Windows apps. Ever see how many Imacs are sitting in authorized Apple Repair shops compared to PCs? Scarey isnt it?
This think looks very much like 'Artemis' the Mac Apple produced a couple of years ago to celebrate their 20th anneversary. Not very creative on NEC's part.
you can cut away the plastic case till you get to the pins which connect to the battery. probe with volmeter to get correct polarity.
solder fine wire (telco wire) to the pins..
add battery pack.
The N in NEC stands for Nippon - Nippon Electronics Corp. I don't get it... what's your point?
little did i know id have to spend the rest of
my life listening to idiots drool over the same
goddam fad year after year after year after year
Damn, maybe that explains why my USB QuickCam was on the blitz! My mouse and keyboard were running fine, but the QuickCam would overheat and get crappy-ass video! My brother had an old serial-port QuickCam from the old days and it had better performance than the QuickCam Pro I just bought... Ok, I will try it with a powered hub.
I bought a LS-120, and they suck...
1) their performance is slower than my parallel port zip drive even though they use an IDE port... IDE zip on the other hand drives are quite speedy in my experience.
2) Also the quality of the drive i bought (mitsubishi chemical) was CRAP. The guard on the power connector broke off when I tried to install it and it makes all kinds of god awful noises... sounds like a giant mosquito doing the nasty...
3) They have all kinds of incompatibilities with anything before Win95 OSR2 and also with WinNT - its install disks won't boot from a LS-120. (but it does work on linux)
4) The documentation and the software (on mine anyway) looked like it was written by a crosseyed monkey...
Don't waste your money on LS120- zip is by far the better value
It's amusing to remember that, many moons ago, people were complaining about Apple computers using 3.5" diskettes instead of the standard 5.25" size....
Y'know, it's really sad (in a pathetic kind of way) how short memories are...
The Z-whatever described in the press release as "The Perfect Blend Of Groundbreaking Design, Cutting-Edge Technology And Operational Simplicity In A Home Computer" It's pretty amusing to think of what their definition of operational simplicity must be if they're installing Windows98 on these boxes.
But anyway...
I guess these guys never saw a 20th Anniversary Mac, or even a Monorail box. And, I remember the pizzabox machine too.
In three years, they'll be coming out with beige machines that you put under your desk. I can see the press release now: "...Neutral color compliments any decor, while the concealable main unit hides unobtrusively under your desk." And the same fools will be slobbering over them...
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
The iMacs are on a different speed scale, with a 66mhz bus and SO-DIMMs instead of SDRAM. Benchmarks I've seen of the 333mhz iMac showed that it was still slightly slower than the 300mzh Powermac.
(following up my own post) ooops... I meant 55 KBits/sec, or 5.5 KBytes/sec -> darn good for an analog modem on a normal (clean) telco line.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
A Packard fscking _bell_ at twice the price of an iMac is an answer to what, exactly? I was quite prepared to go 'oh dear, still it's good for Apple to see some competition in this area', but this is _ridiculous_. Is that the best the industry can do? It's _pathetic_. Keep all the cheesy misfeatures but make it cost _less_ than the iMac thank you, otherwise it's a sick joke. I can't believe that you end up getting more linux for your money from _Apple_ hardware, it's just ludicrous. That certainly is not why _I_ use Apple hardware, and I'm not wealthy. What is going on, when in a particular definable category of computing (goofy industrial designs ;) ) the PC versions are completely inferior in, of all things, price/performance? And have just as much proprietary junk as Apple always had? Is this going to continue and become true for more mainstream computers, too?
I think the whole point about the imac is that it doesn'y look like a computer...
:u)
That last machine still looks like a computer, ok a really neat one but still a computer...
Just look at the keyboard... I really don't like that curve it has.. Anyway it is very expensive anyway... I would rather make my own case out of wood...
Ofcourse win98 supports multiple USB adapters and multiple USB hubs.
Try seeing how well linux supports USB.
Yep, I'd prefer to run a cruddy OS without memory protection, a command prompt, support for one mouse button and no basic internet software like a telnet client.
I can't see what is so innovative about the NEC Z1 visually. This is just a 2 year late Wintel knock-off of the 20th Anniversary Macintosh. Been There, Done That design.
Take a gander of what NEC is ripping off here:
http://lowendmac.com/ppc/tam.shtml
Boy, aren't those Wintel manufacturers are on the leading edge of design! That's what's great about Mac. What I get today, you Windows folks get tomorrow. Plus, as a bonus, I still can run everything you can as well, today -- Both Windows and Unix(Linux, NetBSD & MacOS X -- oops you can't run that).
There's flame for thought...
pax,
toupsie
I would suggest the ms usb natural keyboard but they changed the design on me :(
now the arrow keys are bunched up together. aparently compaq and co thought the keyboards were too big >:|
In other words, all your doing is sharing the bandwith among four ports instead of two. It still helps in reducing the need for a hub, but that's it.
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
It has an LCD screen. AFAIK, those still aren't cheap. Not that that makes this thing worth the price, but that would explain where at least some of the price comes from.
Sun had computer like this in the past. I remeber a spark luggable that was essentially the same thing only it was thinker and heavier. Other than that it had a very similar feture set.
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
Anyone who thinks this competes with an iMac is a moron. It costs twice as much!!! Would you compare a $20,000 Honda Accord with a $40,000 Porche?!?!? No, of course not! Would you blame someone for choosing the Accord over the Porche?!?! No, of course not!
When will you people realize that the iMac is a great computer, it just wasn't intended for the typical Slashdot reader! And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! I bet that for 90% of the people who read Slashdot, the iMac is a great computer for their significant others.
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
What's the big deal ? I don't know why it was compared to the iMac in the first place ...
Stop comparing it to everything else you can think of, and judge it for what it is !
I think it's great machine ! Plenty of power under the hood and everything, and takes little desktop room.
Sure Laptops are good, but typing on those keyboards is a PAIN, and the screen is smaller.
This is great for a home office, or small businesses. I'd get one, add a PC Card NIC, and be on my way, of course I couldn't care less about the DVD, especially if running Linux.
All in all this a cool box, IMHO.
And who gives a damn who they trie to copy, immitate, or who had what idea first ? I don't. Really doesn't matter. What matters is the end products.
J.F.
Oh, and M doesn't have anywhere near the memory leaking capacaity of N. I like it. The UI code has a ways to go, though. Now, if only I could put that rendering engine in the simple and beautiful UI of arena....
1) This is so true, although I'm not sure about the parallel port Zip. I've yet to try out the new x2 LS-120's but the originals are slow compared to ZIP.
2) Can't say anything about this comment.
3) Booting the NT install disks isn't a problem. If you've got BIOS support to boot off of the LS-120, you've probably got support to boot off of the CD-ROM (unless its SCSI, but that's a different story). Now, if I could only get Sun to make the Solaris CD bootable.
4) Agreed. Then again, so are most hardware manuals I've come across.
You forgot though, that LS-120 media are far more sensitive than Zip media. I've had 2 LS-120 disks permantly damaged out of 6, and 0 of 17 Zip disks damaged.
I'd be happy if Iomega would release an internal SCSI version of the 250.
OK, thats a bit odd really. I'm a PC user, although not i'm really loyal to the platform (but i am loyal to my Linux, even a little rabid). I would be loyal to the hardware, if it was any good. =)
I mean, lets fact it. Intel and its whole little set of 80's baggage is not very good by my stretch of the word. Its to bad.
So blah, if you have iMAC envy, buy an iMAC, put linux on it, E and what nasty iMAC theme. There ya go.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Why did they go with a wireless keyboard a a wireful mouse??? I've had a wireless logitech mouse since April and wouldn't give it up for anything. I no longer have to deal with mouse gravity! But I don't really care if my keyboards's tied to my computer.
A wireless mouse is much more useful than a wireless keyboard, IMHO.
/peter
is that sound on the 256AV isn't supported by any Linux sound driver solution.
The spec sheet claimed that the flat panel is XGA.
Isn't XGA limited to 1024x768?
That would kinda suck.
/peter
of cpurse Linux, until recently,
wasn't concerned with being
'competitive' or a desktop OS.
The main impetus to things like USB support
seems to be when one of the devs have a
wizzy new device then want to use. Until
a few months ago, i hadn't seen much of
anything usb (and no, USB keyboards are
not my idea of wizzy)
Um, wasn't this 'Ultimate Refinement in PC Design' actually spearheaded by a little company called Monorail, say, 3-4 years ago? They had units that looked exactly like this, and the hardware was not that far removed (Pentium class, 2-3Gig drives, etc.) All the hardware was in the LCD unit, and it actually had a base that looked a little more sturdy than the Z1's base.
I have some of them here at work. They perform well (for what they are), they're quiet, and they can take one expansion card and 2 more SIMMS. The only thing the Monorail's didn't have was an Active Matrix LCD, as far as I know. They were a little pricey when they came out (like $1500-$2500), but this Z1 doesn't seem that much more advanced--except for the LCD.
This year (I believe) Monorail decided that their LCD units were not selling, so they decided to become another clone manufacturer. Though not well recognized or heavily purchased, these machines were ideal for situations where deskspace, noise, and power consumption is at a premium.
I think it would be ironic to see these 'new' machines take off, where the Monorails tried and failed. Releasing a product before the world was ready for it, I guess...
Yup. I am one of those 90%.
/. 90% as well. Gimme emacs, gimp and apache on an iMac, and I'm not sure what else I'd need.
And, like everybody else around here, I'm a tinkerer. I've run linux for web development, as a router, and as a desktop. I've tried GeoWorks, OS/2, most of the Windows flavors, and BeOS on PPC. I've used Slackware, RedHat, Debian, SuSE, and Caldera. I helped administer a FreeBSD server in a library. I buy or assemble a computer every few months then usually sell it after I get bored.
But nothing has proven of any lasting value until I got an iMac at home (well, okay, that FreeBSD box was pretty solid). It takes care of a lot of things that bug me: it's small, quiet, doesn't demand a lot of maintenance, makes good use of the ADSL line and it runs Netscape Communicator without a hitch for hours on end. Most Linux boxes won't even do the last part.
If it had a bit more room for more pixels and ran a terminal window with bash, it'd serve the needs of a good chunk of that
Sure, Apple is greedy and pushes silly proprietary ideas too far. But when they get the hardware right, it's damn impressive to see. Nobody else seems to understand the idea of a home Internet appliance. Give 'em some credit.
well to tell you the truth I've never seen a PC in an Authorized Apple repair shop....
Yeah, of course it does =)
The 2.3's have it and there are patches floating around for the 2.2's.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Doesn't anyone understand why it's NOT an iMac competitor? Because the z1 IS a Wintel! Hello -- a big plus for the iMac is that the stupidity of Windows is not present. Yawn.
A Gateway rep was on campus the other day showing off the new Profile. The Profile looks similar to the Z1. The Profile was vey laptop-ish, LCD display, ATI Rage LT video chip (same as in the Powerbook G3 IIRC), SO-DIMM RAM, etc. It was going for $2000 at base config.
As for the Z1 (and the Profile) being faster than the iMac, I certainly hope they are since they cost twice as much.
Yeah, and Linux weenies WITHOUT pimples can get dates, same as Mac users and Windows users. What's your point?
This one sure didn't take much time to succumb... must be running something by Bill's Boys :)
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Whizzmo