Can someone explain to me why this is such an affront to civil rights?
Because you are punishing and restricting one group of people for the actions of another. Instead of trying to catch the drug dealers, they kick out all the kids.
What is interesting is that the Philippines will probably be a good illustration of whether technology can solve all our ills, or if it merely causes more problems.
Name me one person who has claimed that we can. Simply throwing technology or money at a problem without any thought to execution is going to fail.
I wouldn't be surprised if stuff like this was happening in any small town in the U.S.
And I certainly hope that people will raise hell about it. Even if this is only one small town in the Philipines, other cities or the government might impliment it if people don't stand up for themselves.
You are correct about the relatively low power consumption of PPCs. But this is an issue only for laptops etc. The K7 is circa 50 Watts which is not difficult to deal with in a properly designed system.
Not an issue for desktops? Dual K7's would take up 100 watts of power all by themselves! You want a quad system with anything else in it, you might as well put in a seperate power supply just for the cpu's!
There's also the problem that more power means more heat. Apple only puts a small heatsink and no fan on their G3's (don't know bout the G4's) because they run so cool. Unless you have a Kyrotech system, your K7's are going to run hot, even with big 'sinks and fans.
The G4 is nothing more than a G3 with slightly improved FPU and the Altivec extensions.
No, the G4 is the successor to the 604e, NOT the 603e. The latter was intended to be a cheap consumer processor while the 604e's were designed more for servers.
But PowerPC hasn't kept pace with microarchitecture developments in the x86 world let alone with its RISC brethren.
How so? I don't know how the G4 stacks up against other RISC chips like the Alpha or the Ultrasparc, but it is far ahead of x86 in many areas. The G4's have Altivec, great FP and integer performance, run cooler with less heat, aren't bogged down by anchient 80's baggage etc.
It has ridiculously short pipelines and The roadmap shows the G4 hitting 1 GHz in a 0.15 um copper process. I should bloody well hope so - the Alpha EV68 and AMD K7 will likely exceed 1.5 GHz in a 0.18 um aluminum process
It probably will. The PowerPC architecture was designed to have a long life span, so if the G4 doesn't hit 1.5 ghz I'm sure the G5 will. You might even see one in a laptop since the PowerPC's run so much cooler.
As for your 1.5 ghz K7 system, just take off one of your drive bay covers and use your computer as a toaster oven. Not that the K7's aren't great chips, but damn are those things hot and power hungry.
Getting Linux to run on the iBook will probably be easy, although it might be a while before Airport works and the advanced power saving features may never be used to thier full extent. Unless Apple releases that stuff in Darwin.......
OTOH, the PPC guys don't have to worry about hot swaping drives or infra-red support.
Will I be able to use my Microsoft (ugh) Intellimouse USB on my iMac now?
Maybe, but I think it's unlikley. If it doesn't work under Mac OS, it probably wont work under linux.
I got a cheap USB three button from Belkin in March. It worked on the Mac OS, and did the same under LinuxPPC R4. Cool thing was, I didn't have to do any fiddling with config files; all three buttons functioned just like they would on a PC right off the bat.
HOWEVER, Linux doesn't support USB plug and play, AFAIK. I found this out the hard way when I unplugged one of the mice from my iMac and spent the next half hour fscking my partitions.:-)
Linus is threatening to improve USB support in 2.4, maybe P&P will work then.
Hence the 'all machines sold in 1997 will be able to run Rhapsody' and the x86 op-code version of Rhapsody were both killed.
Yes, but Rhapsody itself was killed, remember? Apple decided to merge the BSD code with the Mac OS, keeping the majoraty of the Mac API's to make transition to OSX easier.
At least make the arrow keys bigger so one can control Quake in a manner I'm used to already..
Then learn a new way, as using the arrow keys for movement or the keyboard for aiming is for newbies.:-)
I hate Stuffit. This isn't Apple's fault directly, but by NOT bundling something better we're all hooked on that crappy Stuffit. Almost no one registers, so everytime you use it those sluggish 68000 CPU emulator libraries get loaded.
Download the latest versions of Stuffit Expander and Dropstuff. They FINALLY threw in some PPC code; compressing and uncompressing are several times faster.
Here's something I don't get. The Macs I've used all had one-button mice, but X Windows seems to require 2 buttons (with a third being really useful.) How do Apple+Linux users get around this? Do you have to reconfigure X or is there some sort of emulation via keyboard commands?
I think you can do both, although I think its a lot easier just to set up button emulation. Any Linux distro for the Mac should have good instructions on how to do this.
Furthermore if you get a two or three button mouse does this solve problems or create them?
I got a cheap 3 button USB mouse for my iMac, which was running LinuxPPC R4 at the time. I unpluged the old mouse, and pluged in the new one.
Then my machine crashed because plug and play was not supported.:)
Once I was done fscking my partitions, I fired up KDE and the new mouse just worked; didn't have to fiddle with anything (for once).
Yes, and most are a bit expensive too. The PPC 7400 chips in the G4 only cost about $450 at the high (500 MHz) end, and the announced pricing for these CPU upgrades from XLR8 and others is about $900.
I belive the price on the G4 only includes the chip itself, not the L2 cache. Also, there is competition among card vendors, but the demand isn't high.
Would I be wrong in guessing you made these opinions more than five years ago? Unless you're talking about the current OS and hardware, I might as well bitch about Windows 3.11 or the crappiness of the 1.0 Linux kernel.
No they didn't. The relationship hit some rocks when Apple and Moto wanted to go with Altivec, and IBM wanted to go with higher mhz. They made up when IBM was shown how Altivec could be useful for servers.
I bet you believed that a G3 333 was three times faster than a P2 400 too didn't you.
It was twice as fast, and yes it was a valid claim since it only talked about integer calculations and not floating point, where the PII was better.
If the G4 were actually 3 times faster than a P3 600, it would also be faster than an Alpha 21264 and the fastest HP PA-RISC processors.
For operations that make good use of Altivec, yes it could be that fast. And even w/o Altivec, the G4 should stack up nicely against those other processors at similar megahertz.
So before you start spouting numbers make sure you know about hardware design and what those numbers mean.
Heh.
If you've ever taken a design class it takes usually 2-3 risc instructions to do the same operation a intel instruction takes.
That is why RISC is faster than CISC! It is faster for the processor to do 2+2+2+2 than 2^3.
When all is said and done I doubt the tests will show that the new 400Mhz marvle will be able to outperform a athlon or P3 chip.
It should outperform them (RISC, better FPU and integer calcs) even without Altivec. With Altivec, the P3's and the K7's will be blown out of the water.
Not to mention the other benifits the PowerPC's have, namely the low amount of heat generated and power needed. You'll probably see a G4 in a laptop in the next year. I doubt you'll see the same for a K7.
Face it Jon, both current Alphas (21264) and Althons (K7-650) can run circles around the G4, regardless of what Apple would have us believe.
Oh, so you must work at IBM or some other big company with access to Apple's G4 systems and had months of time to do in depth benchmakrs of the three architectures to make such an authoritative statement.
you need a good OS, and not just a pretty GUI face!
The Mac OS is a lot more than that. Installing new hardware and software is a cynch 98% of the time, you can switch settings like IP information without restarting, an advanced way of handing applications and files, along with other cool stuff. Like the best color calibration of any OS on any platform.
There is more to computers than running servers or playing games.
The question I have, is what point - at what threshold will M$ decide "Right, we've given them enough now, we'll pull applications/support" or do something that will seriously put Apple at a disadvantage.
Microsoft makes big money off of MS Office for the Mac, probably over $200 mill per year (just a rough guess based on last years Office sales, if somebody knows better step in).
If Microsoft dumped the Mac, it would be a golden opportunity for Sun (StarOffice) or Corel (Wordperfect), as they'd have a captive audience in Apple 15%+ market share. Or Apple itself could revitalize Claris Works (now Apple Works) if nobody else would provide an office suite.
According to the LinuxPPC people, writing an OS for the G3 "should be easy" too, but ask Be, that didn't happen either.
Not a very good point, since Be is getting money from Intel to develop for x86. Saying they couldn't devlop for Apple's G3 Macs was a little dishonest; they should have just said it wasn't in their interests anymore.
judging by the information vacuum on the subject of YellowBox licensing for NT
Sometime during the Rhapsody days, Apple said that Yellow Box apps could be developed royalty free for any platform. Rhapsody isn't around anymore, but the Yellow Box is. Unless Apple has specifically stated otherwise in the last two years, it wont cost you a dime to make NT Yellow Box apps.
A good quality P3 with well-picked components will run rings around a Mac.
On the iMac, yes it will, and I would hope so since the iMac is a consumer machine and the P3 is not a consumer processor. Otherwise, Macs are really only deficient in two areas: sound and video. Sure, it was cool that Macs didn't need sound cards- back in the early 90's. Now even cheap $30 PC sound cards will provide more quality and options. Earlier this year, Apple made a deal with some company to include their technology on Mac motherboards, but it hasn't shown up yet (don't remember all the details).
The other thing that Macs are missing are mid range video cards of good quality. Now that Apple is finally moving to AGP, hopefully more companies will start offering Mac drivers for thier cards. 3dfx is interested, but I'd prefer it if Apple got an OEM deal with nVidia (I really like their cards, cept for the so-so linux drivers).
(rant)(bias) I say "of good quality" because ATI cards don't cut it. They are cheap cards with cheap drivers from a cheap company that makes cheap deals with OEM's. The drivers are poor quality, have cause problems for the B&W's and the company has been EXTREMLY late in providing drivers for other PCI Macs. The Rage Pro's are old cards, but unfortunatly are still used on all of Apple's machines except for the B&W's and the G4's. (/bias)(/rant)
Plus, you get all the joy of a closed system, which any self-respecting geek will loathe.
Apple isn't any less open than PC manufacturers. The only parts that are kept closed are the ROM chips, the firmware, and the GUI. Every other spec is freely available, along with the code of the operating system.
No PC manufacturer would be able to get away with this
Well, then Microsoft, Intel and Compaq must be small, two bit companies.
I strongly suggest that you not let Apple do it either.
Apple will fix the firmware once the G4 hype has faded. If they don't do that within six months, you can bitch. Wait, no you can't, because Apple never said the machines were processor upgradable.
Which might be why you and PC magazines love to use it. Along with MS Office benchmarks and operations that did heavy floating point calculations but light on the integers.
Quake was ported by Westlake Interactive, not id. While they are good programers, they went for compatibility before performance, so the Mac version lags.
A Quake benchmark is just as biased as a bytemark benchmark. That and the game is four years old! At least use a newer application like Photoshop or Quake 3.
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Can someone explain to me why this is such an affront to civil rights?
Because you are punishing and restricting one group of people for the actions of another. Instead of trying to catch the drug dealers, they kick out all the kids.
What is interesting is that the Philippines will probably be a good illustration of whether technology can solve all our ills, or if it merely causes more problems.
Name me one person who has claimed that we can. Simply throwing technology or money at a problem without any thought to execution is going to fail.
I wouldn't be surprised if stuff like this was happening in any small town in the U.S.
And I certainly hope that people will raise hell about it. Even if this is only one small town in the Philipines, other cities or the government might impliment it if people don't stand up for themselves.
You are correct about the relatively low power consumption of PPCs. But this is an issue only for laptops etc. The K7 is circa 50 Watts which is not difficult to deal with in a properly designed system.
Not an issue for desktops? Dual K7's would take up 100 watts of power all by themselves! You want a quad system with anything else in it, you might as well put in a seperate power supply just for the cpu's!
There's also the problem that more power means more heat. Apple only puts a small heatsink and no fan on their G3's (don't know bout the G4's) because they run so cool. Unless you have a Kyrotech system, your K7's are going to run hot, even with big 'sinks and fans.
The G4 is nothing more than a G3 with slightly improved FPU and the Altivec extensions.
No, the G4 is the successor to the 604e, NOT the 603e. The latter was intended to be a cheap consumer processor while the 604e's were designed more for servers.
But PowerPC hasn't kept pace with microarchitecture developments in the x86 world let alone with its RISC brethren.
How so? I don't know how the G4 stacks up against other RISC chips like the Alpha or the Ultrasparc, but it is far ahead of x86 in many areas. The G4's have Altivec, great FP and integer performance, run cooler with less heat, aren't bogged down by anchient 80's baggage etc.
It has ridiculously short pipelines and
The roadmap shows the G4 hitting 1 GHz in a 0.15 um copper process. I should bloody well hope so - the Alpha EV68 and AMD K7 will likely exceed 1.5 GHz in a 0.18 um aluminum process
It probably will. The PowerPC architecture was designed to have a long life span, so if the G4 doesn't hit 1.5 ghz I'm sure the G5 will. You might even see one in a laptop since the PowerPC's run so much cooler.
As for your 1.5 ghz K7 system, just take off one of your drive bay covers and use your computer as a toaster oven. Not that the K7's aren't great chips, but damn are those things hot and power hungry.
Getting Linux to run on the iBook will probably be easy, although it might be a while before Airport works and the advanced power saving features may never be used to thier full extent. Unless Apple releases that stuff in Darwin.......
OTOH, the PPC guys don't have to worry about hot swaping drives or infra-red support.
Will I be able to use my Microsoft (ugh) Intellimouse USB on my iMac now?
:-)
Maybe, but I think it's unlikley. If it doesn't work under Mac OS, it probably wont work under linux.
I got a cheap USB three button from Belkin in March. It worked on the Mac OS, and did the same under LinuxPPC R4. Cool thing was, I didn't have to do any fiddling with config files; all three buttons functioned just like they would on a PC right off the bat.
HOWEVER, Linux doesn't support USB plug and play, AFAIK. I found this out the hard way when I unplugged one of the mice from my iMac and spent the next half hour fscking my partitions.
Linus is threatening to improve USB support in 2.4, maybe P&P will work then.
The project ,,Self-Regulation of Internet Content" deals with the problem of harmful and illegal content and the protection of minors on the Internet.
Banning porn wont keep teens from discovering their hormones and having unsafe sex.
Education, not blind ignorance, is the way to protect minors.
Hence the 'all machines sold in 1997 will be able to run Rhapsody' and the x86 op-code version of Rhapsody were both killed.
Yes, but Rhapsody itself was killed, remember? Apple decided to merge the BSD code with the Mac OS, keeping the majoraty of the Mac API's to make transition to OSX easier.
At least make the arrow keys bigger so one can control Quake in a manner I'm used to already..
:-)
Then learn a new way, as using the arrow keys for movement or the keyboard for aiming is for newbies.
I hate Stuffit. This isn't Apple's fault directly, but by NOT bundling something better we're all hooked on that crappy Stuffit. Almost no one registers, so everytime you use it those sluggish 68000 CPU emulator libraries get loaded.
Download the latest versions of Stuffit Expander and Dropstuff. They FINALLY threw in some PPC code; compressing and uncompressing are several times faster.
Here's something I don't get. The Macs I've used all had one-button mice, but X Windows seems to require 2 buttons (with a third being really useful.) How do Apple+Linux users get around this? Do you have to reconfigure X or is there some sort of emulation via keyboard commands?
:)
I think you can do both, although I think its a lot easier just to set up button emulation. Any Linux distro for the Mac should have good instructions on how to do this.
Furthermore if you get a two or three button mouse does this solve problems or create them?
I got a cheap 3 button USB mouse for my iMac, which was running LinuxPPC R4 at the time. I unpluged the old mouse, and pluged in the new one.
Then my machine crashed because plug and play was not supported.
Once I was done fscking my partitions, I fired up KDE and the new mouse just worked; didn't have to fiddle with anything (for once).
Yes, and most are a bit expensive too. The PPC 7400 chips in the G4 only cost about $450 at the high (500 MHz) end, and the announced pricing for these CPU upgrades from XLR8 and others is about $900.
I belive the price on the G4 only includes the chip itself, not the L2 cache. Also, there is competition among card vendors, but the demand isn't high.
Would I be wrong in guessing you made these opinions more than five years ago? Unless you're talking about the current OS and hardware, I might as well bitch about Windows 3.11 or the crappiness of the 1.0 Linux kernel.
The "AIM" group broke up last year.
No they didn't. The relationship hit some rocks when Apple and Moto wanted to go with Altivec, and IBM wanted to go with higher mhz. They made up when IBM was shown how Altivec could be useful for servers.
I bet you believed that a G3 333 was three times faster than a P2 400 too didn't you.
It was twice as fast, and yes it was a valid claim since it only talked about integer calculations and not floating point, where the PII was better.
If the G4 were actually 3 times faster than a P3 600, it would also be faster than an Alpha 21264 and the fastest HP PA-RISC processors.
For operations that make good use of Altivec, yes it could be that fast. And even w/o Altivec, the G4 should stack up nicely against those other processors at similar megahertz.
So before you start spouting numbers make sure you know about hardware design and what those numbers mean.
Heh.
If you've ever taken a design class it takes usually 2-3 risc instructions to do the same operation a intel instruction takes.
That is why RISC is faster than CISC! It is faster for the processor to do 2+2+2+2 than 2^3.
When all is said and done I doubt the tests will show that the new 400Mhz marvle will be able to outperform a athlon or P3 chip.
It should outperform them (RISC, better FPU and integer calcs) even without Altivec. With Altivec, the P3's and the K7's will be blown out of the water.
Not to mention the other benifits the PowerPC's have, namely the low amount of heat generated and power needed. You'll probably see a G4 in a laptop in the next year. I doubt you'll see the same for a K7.
e) are there even similar-speed PII's in portables?
I think not.
Your point being what? Its not the fault of the PowerPC that Pentiums chips and K7's are hot, power greedy chips.
You'll see G4 laptops. I doubt you'll ever see a full fledged K7 in one.
Face it Jon, both current Alphas (21264) and Althons (K7-650) can run circles around the G4, regardless of what Apple would have us believe.
Oh, so you must work at IBM or some other big company with access to Apple's G4 systems and had months of time to do in depth benchmakrs of the three architectures to make such an authoritative statement.
you need a good OS, and not just a pretty GUI face!
The Mac OS is a lot more than that. Installing new hardware and software is a cynch 98% of the time, you can switch settings like IP information without restarting, an advanced way of handing applications and files, along with other cool stuff. Like the best color calibration of any OS on any platform.
There is more to computers than running servers or playing games.
If you're a student, you can get it for $200. If you're already a registered developer, you can get it for $99.
Or you could just download most of the operating system (Darwin) for free.
The question I have, is what point - at what threshold will M$ decide "Right, we've given them enough now, we'll pull applications/support" or do something that will seriously put Apple at a disadvantage.
Microsoft makes big money off of MS Office for the Mac, probably over $200 mill per year (just a rough guess based on last years Office sales, if somebody knows better step in).
If Microsoft dumped the Mac, it would be a golden opportunity for Sun (StarOffice) or Corel (Wordperfect), as they'd have a captive audience in Apple 15%+ market share. Or Apple itself could revitalize Claris Works (now Apple Works) if nobody else would provide an office suite.
so you know what your post will look like before you submit it.
While the G4 does look interesting, it is still made by apple! YUCK!
Actually, the chip is co-developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola, with the later two doing all the manufacturing.
Ohh yeah its a supercomputer, NOT!
Its called marketing. Every commercial company does it.
Two words: Alpha, SPARC!!
Well, set down an RS/6000 with PowerPC next to an Apha box and a Sunsparc and compare the three.
Mac rumors site bullshit.
www.macintouch.com isn't a rumors site. Its good for technical info and other information.
According to the LinuxPPC people, writing an OS for the G3 "should be easy" too, but ask Be, that didn't happen either.
Not a very good point, since Be is getting money from Intel to develop for x86. Saying they couldn't devlop for Apple's G3 Macs was a little dishonest; they should have just said it wasn't in their interests anymore.
judging by the information vacuum on the subject of YellowBox licensing for NT
Sometime during the Rhapsody days, Apple said that Yellow Box apps could be developed royalty free for any platform. Rhapsody isn't around anymore, but the Yellow Box is. Unless Apple has specifically stated otherwise in the last two years, it wont cost you a dime to make NT Yellow Box apps.
Sorry, but the AC was right, the G4's are multicore capable. I don't know if Motorola plans on making any, but IBM sure is.
A good quality P3 with well-picked components will run rings around a Mac.
On the iMac, yes it will, and I would hope so since the iMac is a consumer machine and the P3 is not a consumer processor. Otherwise, Macs are really only deficient in two areas: sound and video. Sure, it was cool that Macs didn't need sound cards- back in the early 90's. Now even cheap $30 PC sound cards will provide more quality and options. Earlier this year, Apple made a deal with some company to include their technology on Mac motherboards, but it hasn't shown up yet (don't remember all the details).
The other thing that Macs are missing are mid range video cards of good quality. Now that Apple is finally moving to AGP, hopefully more companies will start offering Mac drivers for thier cards. 3dfx is interested, but I'd prefer it if Apple got an OEM deal with nVidia (I really like their cards, cept for the so-so linux drivers).
(rant)(bias)
I say "of good quality" because ATI cards don't cut it. They are cheap cards with cheap drivers from a cheap company that makes cheap deals with OEM's. The drivers are poor quality, have cause problems for the B&W's and the company has been EXTREMLY late in providing drivers for other PCI Macs. The Rage Pro's are old cards, but unfortunatly are still used on all of Apple's machines except for the B&W's and the G4's.
(/bias)(/rant)
Plus, you get all the joy of a closed system, which any self-respecting geek will loathe.
Apple isn't any less open than PC manufacturers. The only parts that are kept closed are the ROM chips, the firmware, and the GUI. Every other spec is freely available, along with the code of the operating system.
No PC manufacturer would be able to get away with this
Well, then Microsoft, Intel and Compaq must be small, two bit companies.
I strongly suggest that you not let Apple do it either.
Apple will fix the firmware once the G4 hype has faded. If they don't do that within six months, you can bitch. Wait, no you can't, because Apple never said the machines were processor upgradable.
Which might be why you and PC magazines love to use it. Along with MS Office benchmarks and operations that did heavy floating point calculations but light on the integers.
Quake was ported by Westlake Interactive, not id. While they are good programers, they went for compatibility before performance, so the Mac version lags.
A Quake benchmark is just as biased as a bytemark benchmark. That and the game is four years old! At least use a newer application like Photoshop or Quake 3.