Absolutely correct. That seems to be the overwhelming perception here in Australia. If that was an Australian moderator marking that comment as a troll, you should get away from your computer for a few days and actuallly get outside and start talking to some people. In this country we do not so much vote for an Australian Government to govern us, as vote for a regional outpost of the United States administration who we hope will interpret American interests and policies in our favour.
Great. In addition to our beef and sugar farmers getting screwed (again), now we open ourselves up to ridiculous copyright laws shown to be fundamentally broken already in the US. Is this what we have to show for the blood on our hands from tagging along in the Iraqi invasion last year? There's only one good thing about this, and that is it will help hasten the demise of John W. Howard as the Prime Minister of our country. And for that I can hardly thank him enough.
Doesn't anybody love/hate the Leyland P76 anymore? The most reviled car in Australian history?
I think the P76 has transcended badness now and has become an Australian motoring icon, up there with the FJ Holden, the Kingswood and the Monaro.
At any rate, you can keep your Falcon XR8, Commodore SS or Monaro in the showroom. I'll take something small, punchy and French any day over some big dumb Aussie muscle car. Good to see that the French managed to get 2 cars into the top 10 worst cars of all time though:-)
And the traditional workstation never needed 4 gigabytes of memory. So why the poo-pooing of that limit?
It depends on what you're doing. For complex modelling tasks the problem often needs to be scaled down to the amount of RAM you have available, not the other way around. You could always stuff 8GB of RAM into an SGI Octane, which is about as 'traditional' a workstation type of computer as they come. Someone obviously needed that kind of capacity for SGI to build it in.
It's a workstation! It doesn't need more than 4GB of RAM! It's not supposed to be a supercomputer or a server or a kiddie's game box. It's a freaking workstation!
Uhhhh...technical workstations have traditionally been used for stuff like large scale CAD and industrial design work, complex graphic visualizations and mathematical modelling. The traditional realm of the 'workstation' (before the term was highjacked by every x86 vendor with a minitower case and a 3 button mouse) was CPU, memory and graphics intensive work that would normally make a 'kiddie's game box' break down and cry. Having the ability to have a lot of RAM in a workstation is a key feature.
The technical workstation market was how Sun got started. The Blade 1500 is a very poor excuse for a technical workstation, yet it is priced like one. It's lack of RAM capacity is yet another illustration of this point.
Maybe on sheer performance it will be beaten by x86 however for crunching big data sets the UltraSparc is just more effecient
Could you provide hard evidence of UltraSPARC systems beating comparably priced Athlon64 or Opteron systems for large data set problems? There are a lot of people in this discussion regurgitating that old chestnut. While it might have been true 5 years ago comparing an UltraSPARC workstation to a 32-bit Pentium III system with a constipated little 133MHz bus, times have most definitely changed. Show me solid benchmarks of a Blade 1500 beating out an Athlon64/Opteron system of the same price, and I'll happily run out and tell everyone that they should be buying an UltraSPARC for their next workstation.
Also some software only runs on Solaris so for that this box is good Ahh NOW we're getting somewhere. Agreed. People who can only run their apps on SPARC/Solaris are locked into the platform, and have no choice. Kind of like all the graphic designers and desktop publishers who were locked into the Mac until serious ports started showing up on the PC. So what's going to happen when the inevitable happens and your specialty app appears for x86/Linux?
Sure, the hardware cost might only be 1% of the software cost for some specialised applications that (for now) only run on SPARC. But why would anyone choose to run their app on a slower, single-vendor proprietary plaform when a faster, open one is available?
They aren't going to, and we can all look forward to seeing the end of Sun's anachronistic SPARC workstation line in the near future.
Sun sent me a Blade 1500 to review. It's real ugly, and doesn't have much space for expansion. Apart from that it's just a PC. With an UltraSPARC IIIi CPU in it mind you, but with a $75 consumer grade Seagate IDE hard drive and a DVD drive from a 3rd tier supplier. Your mother's Dell has higher specced components in it.
It runs kind of OK I guess, about as fast as a 1.8GHz Pentium 4, which for comparison no-one would consider buying for a new PC these days. The Blade 1500 is faster than the Blade 150, but then again so is my Palm PDA. If your vendor still hasn't ported your application to Linux, then this workstation might make some sense while you wait for them to do it. If you're not a Sun shop, this won't interest you. If you *are* a Sun shop, then this will be an adequate last Sun workstation for you before you head off into the x86/Linux arena in 2005/2006.
Take a loving look at your SparcStation 20 you've got stashed away in the basement...they don't make them like they used to.
That's obviously true. It is important to remember that back in the days when Java was slow, starting a hello world program could take several seconds. Many people still remember their poor experiences with starting their simple test programs and decided that Java is, and forever will be, very slow starting up.
That could also be more to do with people running a 200MHz Pentium MMX machine with 64MB of RAM when they first started playing around with Java, versus the 2000MHz Athlon XP machine with 1GB of RAM that they have now.
Welcome to irrelevance. You can now take your rightful place with all the other irrelevant people who had the same whiny elitist attitude when the GUI, WYSIWYG wordprocessing, RAD IDE programming tools, desktop publishing, digital painting, web browsers, e-mail clients, and digital movie editors were made accessible to the unwashed computing masses.
Now go and flip some toggle switches on your hand-soldered 4-bit calculator or something. Bye bye.
IRC, Longhorn should integrate OpenGL GUI drawing a step further, not just for compositing the screen, but also for compositing the windows... each button, text field, etc being an OpenGL object
You do realise you're comparing a vapourware feature allegedly present in a Microsoft product unlikely to be on shelves before 2006, to an Apple product shipping now in 2003? Christ, if Microsoft is managing to have individual elements in the GUI rendered as OpenGL components in Longhorn, then OS X will have full 4D SensorRama (TM) blowjobs included free by then.
What's your point, except to illustrate that MS is 3 years behind the game?
I've been holding off getting a PDA because I know smart phones will be affordable in a few years.
Fair enough, but if you can afford to play the waiting game with any particular technology, that's probably a good sign that you don't actually need that technology. If you need a PDA, then you'll go out and get one now...it won't matter that it will be faster/cheaper/better in a few years time. All technology will be.
I agree! As soon as Apple ditches USB, FireWire, Ethernet, PCI, AGP, Serial ATA, Bluetooth and 802.11 and adopts some open industry hardware standards, the better!! Damn that proprietary shit out of Cupertino to hell!!!
After waiting for about 2.5 months, my shiny 1.6GHz G5 system finally turned up...and 6 days later was back in its box, being returned to Apple Australia as it was highly unstable, crashing and freezing constantly. Since I've been quoted '2 to 3 weeks' (which in Apple speak means 4 to 6) as the lead time for a replacement G5 system to be built, I should be able to get Panther included for free as a nice little unintentional bonus from Apple.
Of course, I will have been waiting for so long by that stage that the 1.6GHz G5 will be on the verge of being discontinued...
Why? Because I'm going to buy a G5 in six months.:-)
Good decision. The worst thing with the G5 launch this time around was that you still had to wait almost 3 months anyway after you placed your cash down. I'll know better next time (if there is a next time). As a first time Apple buyer, these are the lessons I've learnt:
1: Don't buy Rev. A (everyone seems to know this already) 2: Don't buy from the online AppleStore, go to a retailer instead. You'll get your equipment faster, and have someone to yell at in person when it doesn't work. 3: Resist the temptation (if possible), to configure every little thing on the machine. Apple is no Dell in terms of manufacturing and logistics, and any Build-to-Order options seem to blow out your lead time by weeks, if not months. Upgrading my video card to a Radeon 9600 and dropping the SuperDrive to save some $$$ meant that stock 1.6s were in the shops weeks before my order turned up (which was ordered in July). 4: Start saving as soon as your G5 arrives for Panther, because Apple isn't going to give it to you for free, even if your system will probably still be in for repair when it 10.3 is released. 5: See point 1.
Wow. I feel like a seasoned Apple veteran now! How that company stays in business I'll never know...oh yeah...cool products, but fucked company.
Buy an Apple? Don't buy el-cheapo RAM! Crucial works rather well and is extremely competitive price-wise.
Already done. The original RAM I tried were 2 x 512MB sticks of Apacer DDR333, which created general mayhem. I then tried some Kingmax DDR333 from a friend's PC...again, intermittent freezes and crashes. I then ordered 2 x 512MB sticks from Crucial (and it ended up being cheaper than the crappy Apacer stuff I got locally...got to love a strong Australian dollar at the moment).
Anyway, whatever the problem is, good quality RAM isn't going to fix it now...the G5 continues to freeze and crash even with only the original Apple-supplied RAM in it. That's why I sent it back to Apple...something is really broken inside.
. It's slow as fuck compared to real Intel or AMD hardware. Opteron and Itanium2 absolutely mauls the G5. Nor are there any serious professional graphics hardware available for the G5, yet, AFAIK.
Are you talking about pro-level 3D graphics boards? 3Dlabs is currently in talks with Apple about bringing their workstation 3D cards to the Mac.
I'd love to agree with you there, but my new 1.6GHz G5 has been incredibly unstable since the day it arrived. It will freeze up hard doing just about anything. I went through about 2 hours of troubleshooting over the phone with Apple Australia, and in the end the only thing they could recommend was that I box it up and send it back to them.
If you check the user discussion forums on Apple's support site, there are lots of people having problems with their new G5s freezing and kernel panicking. Some of this is due to a firmware bug that causes 3rd party RAM to wreak havoc, but a lot of it also appears to be related to USB hubs and various USB devices causing kernel panics.
Don't get me wrong...I love the idea of the G5 (which is why I bought one), but for me at least, it's been the least stable piece of computing equipment I've ever owned or used (and this is going back to Apple IIs and Microbees (for the Aussies out there)).
I think Apple may still have a lot of production difficulties to sort out...I think a lot of us have been stung by the infamous 'Don't buy a Revision A Apple product' syndrome.
Of course, even with the G5 sitting there completely frozen on my desk at work, waiting to get off hold with Apple tech support, there was a non-stop stream by passers-by coming into my office to admire the system case and have the requisite demonstration of the side panel coming off, revealing the shiny (crashed) goodness inside.
Hopefully one day I'll get a 1.6GHz G5 that works!
Which brings me to another disadvantage of OS X: the zealots in the user community. Zealotry is one of those things that keeps OS X from improving
Yeah, I guess the OS X zealots really have a thing or two to learn from the open-minded, calm, rational Linux userbase out there. And what better web site than Slashdot to be preaching the virtues of idea-tolerance in the IT industry from? Congratulations on your insightful post.
The reason you need a Mac version of the firmware is usually because the card vendor built detection routines into the driver to prevent it from working with the cheaper PC version of the card, not because the firmware itself is anything special (though it may add extra capabilities).
Yes, unfortunately it often is an artificial 'market segmentation' thing. I must have hit an unlucky run with expansion cards...the PC PCI cards I have tried in my PCI PowerMac have all needed BIOS tweaking to work (or not work, as the case may be). These have included SCSI cards, ATA cards, and of course the infamous PCI Radeon 7500 BIOS flashing trick. The markups on the Mac version of the same card are outrageous (especially in Australia).
pci cards work in any machine with a pci bus, which is most p.c.'s, workstations, and servers, irregardless of the cpu type.
Try putting an x86-compatible PCI card into a PCI Macintosh and see what happens (even if there are drivers for the PCI card in Mac OS). Most will need a Macintosh BIOS to be flashed onto them, and this isn't even possible for some cards. Very few x86 PCI cards will operate in a Mac without some type of modification.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely correct. That seems to be the overwhelming perception here in Australia. If that was an Australian moderator marking that comment as a troll, you should get away from your computer for a few days and actuallly get outside and start talking to some people. In this country we do not so much vote for an Australian Government to govern us, as vote for a regional outpost of the United States administration who we hope will interpret American interests and policies in our favour.
Great. In addition to our beef and sugar farmers getting screwed (again), now we open ourselves up to ridiculous copyright laws shown to be fundamentally broken already in the US. Is this what we have to show for the blood on our hands from tagging along in the Iraqi invasion last year? There's only one good thing about this, and that is it will help hasten the demise of John W. Howard as the Prime Minister of our country. And for that I can hardly thank him enough.
James is well qualified to work with NASA on these planetary explorations. From viewing Terminator 3, it's quite clear it was written in Uranus.
I think the P76 has transcended badness now and has become an Australian motoring icon, up there with the FJ Holden, the Kingswood and the Monaro.
At any rate, you can keep your Falcon XR8, Commodore SS or Monaro in the showroom. I'll take something small, punchy and French any day over some big dumb Aussie muscle car. Good to see that the French managed to get 2 cars into the top 10 worst cars of all time though :-)
It depends on what you're doing. For complex modelling tasks the problem often needs to be scaled down to the amount of RAM you have available, not the other way around. You could always stuff 8GB of RAM into an SGI Octane, which is about as 'traditional' a workstation type of computer as they come. Someone obviously needed that kind of capacity for SGI to build it in.
Uhhhh...technical workstations have traditionally been used for stuff like large scale CAD and industrial design work, complex graphic visualizations and mathematical modelling. The traditional realm of the 'workstation' (before the term was highjacked by every x86 vendor with a minitower case and a 3 button mouse) was CPU, memory and graphics intensive work that would normally make a 'kiddie's game box' break down and cry. Having the ability to have a lot of RAM in a workstation is a key feature.
The technical workstation market was how Sun got started. The Blade 1500 is a very poor excuse for a technical workstation, yet it is priced like one. It's lack of RAM capacity is yet another illustration of this point.
Could you provide hard evidence of UltraSPARC systems beating comparably priced Athlon64 or Opteron systems for large data set problems? There are a lot of people in this discussion regurgitating that old chestnut. While it might have been true 5 years ago comparing an UltraSPARC workstation to a 32-bit Pentium III system with a constipated little 133MHz bus, times have most definitely changed. Show me solid benchmarks of a Blade 1500 beating out an Athlon64/Opteron system of the same price, and I'll happily run out and tell everyone that they should be buying an UltraSPARC for their next workstation.
Also some software only runs on Solaris so for that this box is good
Ahh NOW we're getting somewhere. Agreed. People who can only run their apps on SPARC/Solaris are locked into the platform, and have no choice. Kind of like all the graphic designers and desktop publishers who were locked into the Mac until serious ports started showing up on the PC. So what's going to happen when the inevitable happens and your specialty app appears for x86/Linux?
Sure, the hardware cost might only be 1% of the software cost for some specialised applications that (for now) only run on SPARC. But why would anyone choose to run their app on a slower, single-vendor proprietary plaform when a faster, open one is available?
They aren't going to, and we can all look forward to seeing the end of Sun's anachronistic SPARC workstation line in the near future.
It runs kind of OK I guess, about as fast as a 1.8GHz Pentium 4, which for comparison no-one would consider buying for a new PC these days. The Blade 1500 is faster than the Blade 150, but then again so is my Palm PDA. If your vendor still hasn't ported your application to Linux, then this workstation might make some sense while you wait for them to do it. If you're not a Sun shop, this won't interest you. If you *are* a Sun shop, then this will be an adequate last Sun workstation for you before you head off into the x86/Linux arena in 2005/2006.
Take a loving look at your SparcStation 20 you've got stashed away in the basement...they don't make them like they used to.
Warning to moderators...well disguised goatse.cx link above. Mod down as troll.
That's obviously true. It is important to remember that back in the days when Java was slow, starting a hello world program could take several seconds. Many people still remember their poor experiences with starting their simple test programs and decided that Java is, and forever will be, very slow starting up.
That could also be more to do with people running a 200MHz Pentium MMX machine with 64MB of RAM when they first started playing around with Java, versus the 2000MHz Athlon XP machine with 1GB of RAM that they have now.
Now go and flip some toggle switches on your hand-soldered 4-bit calculator or something. Bye bye.
IRC, Longhorn should integrate OpenGL GUI drawing a step further, not just for compositing the screen, but also for compositing the windows... each button, text field, etc being an OpenGL object
You do realise you're comparing a vapourware feature allegedly present in a Microsoft product unlikely to be on shelves before 2006, to an Apple product shipping now in 2003? Christ, if Microsoft is managing to have individual elements in the GUI rendered as OpenGL components in Longhorn, then OS X will have full 4D SensorRama (TM) blowjobs included free by then.
What's your point, except to illustrate that MS is 3 years behind the game?
pps: i find the fast user switching animation a bit gratuitous though.
Hmmm...I give it 6 months tops before it shows up in KDE...and 3 years before it happens in GNOME [boom tish!]
I've been holding off getting a PDA because I know smart phones will be affordable in a few years.
Fair enough, but if you can afford to play the waiting game with any particular technology, that's probably a good sign that you don't actually need that technology. If you need a PDA, then you'll go out and get one now...it won't matter that it will be faster/cheaper/better in a few years time. All technology will be.
HW Compatibility: Very poor
I agree! As soon as Apple ditches USB, FireWire, Ethernet, PCI, AGP, Serial ATA, Bluetooth and 802.11 and adopts some open industry hardware standards, the better!! Damn that proprietary shit out of Cupertino to hell!!!
still waiting for yours to turn up too, huh?
After waiting for about 2.5 months, my shiny 1.6GHz G5 system finally turned up...and 6 days later was back in its box, being returned to Apple Australia as it was highly unstable, crashing and freezing constantly. Since I've been quoted '2 to 3 weeks' (which in Apple speak means 4 to 6) as the lead time for a replacement G5 system to be built, I should be able to get Panther included for free as a nice little unintentional bonus from Apple.
Of course, I will have been waiting for so long by that stage that the 1.6GHz G5 will be on the verge of being discontinued...
Why? Because I'm going to buy a G5 in six months. :-)
Good decision. The worst thing with the G5 launch this time around was that you still had to wait almost 3 months anyway after you placed your cash down. I'll know better next time (if there is a next time). As a first time Apple buyer, these are the lessons I've learnt:
1: Don't buy Rev. A (everyone seems to know this already)
2: Don't buy from the online AppleStore, go to a retailer instead. You'll get your equipment faster, and have someone to yell at in person when it doesn't work.
3: Resist the temptation (if possible), to configure every little thing on the machine. Apple is no Dell in terms of manufacturing and logistics, and any Build-to-Order options seem to blow out your lead time by weeks, if not months. Upgrading my video card to a Radeon 9600 and dropping the SuperDrive to save some $$$ meant that stock 1.6s were in the shops weeks before my order turned up (which was ordered in July).
4: Start saving as soon as your G5 arrives for Panther, because Apple isn't going to give it to you for free, even if your system will probably still be in for repair when it 10.3 is released.
5: See point 1.
Wow. I feel like a seasoned Apple veteran now! How that company stays in business I'll never know...oh yeah...cool products, but fucked company.
Buy an Apple? Don't buy el-cheapo RAM! Crucial works rather well and is extremely competitive price-wise.
Already done. The original RAM I tried were 2 x 512MB sticks of Apacer DDR333, which created general mayhem. I then tried some Kingmax DDR333 from a friend's PC...again, intermittent freezes and crashes. I then ordered 2 x 512MB sticks from Crucial (and it ended up being cheaper than the crappy Apacer stuff I got locally...got to love a strong Australian dollar at the moment).
Anyway, whatever the problem is, good quality RAM isn't going to fix it now...the G5 continues to freeze and crash even with only the original Apple-supplied RAM in it. That's why I sent it back to Apple...something is really broken inside.
I have a nice, new dual G4 powermac sitting in my office with a nice cinerama display, and it never gets used. It's just too loud.
You know if you're not using it, you can turn it off. That should cure the noise problem.
. It's slow as fuck compared to real Intel or AMD hardware. Opteron and Itanium2 absolutely mauls the G5. Nor are there any serious professional graphics hardware available for the G5, yet, AFAIK.
Are you talking about pro-level 3D graphics boards? 3Dlabs is currently in talks with Apple about bringing their workstation 3D cards to the Mac.
2. It's certainly the most usable and stable.
I'd love to agree with you there, but my new 1.6GHz G5 has been incredibly unstable since the day it arrived. It will freeze up hard doing just about anything. I went through about 2 hours of troubleshooting over the phone with Apple Australia, and in the end the only thing they could recommend was that I box it up and send it back to them.
If you check the user discussion forums on Apple's support site, there are lots of people having problems with their new G5s freezing and kernel panicking. Some of this is due to a firmware bug that causes 3rd party RAM to wreak havoc, but a lot of it also appears to be related to USB hubs and various USB devices causing kernel panics.
Don't get me wrong...I love the idea of the G5 (which is why I bought one), but for me at least, it's been the least stable piece of computing equipment I've ever owned or used (and this is going back to Apple IIs and Microbees (for the Aussies out there)).
I think Apple may still have a lot of production difficulties to sort out...I think a lot of us have been stung by the infamous 'Don't buy a Revision A Apple product' syndrome.
Of course, even with the G5 sitting there completely frozen on my desk at work, waiting to get off hold with Apple tech support, there was a non-stop stream by passers-by coming into my office to admire the system case and have the requisite demonstration of the side panel coming off, revealing the shiny (crashed) goodness inside.
Hopefully one day I'll get a 1.6GHz G5 that works!
Which brings me to another disadvantage of OS X: the zealots in the user community. Zealotry is one of those things that keeps OS X from improving
Yeah, I guess the OS X zealots really have a thing or two to learn from the open-minded, calm, rational Linux userbase out there. And what better web site than Slashdot to be preaching the virtues of idea-tolerance in the IT industry from? Congratulations on your insightful post.
The reason you need a Mac version of the firmware is usually because the card vendor built detection routines into the driver to prevent it from working with the cheaper PC version of the card, not because the firmware itself is anything special (though it may add extra capabilities).
Yes, unfortunately it often is an artificial 'market segmentation' thing. I must have hit an unlucky run with expansion cards...the PC PCI cards I have tried in my PCI PowerMac have all needed BIOS tweaking to work (or not work, as the case may be). These have included SCSI cards, ATA cards, and of course the infamous PCI Radeon 7500 BIOS flashing trick. The markups on the Mac version of the same card are outrageous (especially in Australia).
pci cards work in any machine with a pci bus,
which is most p.c.'s, workstations, and servers,
irregardless of the cpu type.
Try putting an x86-compatible PCI card into a PCI Macintosh and see what happens (even if there are drivers for the PCI card in Mac OS). Most will need a Macintosh BIOS to be flashed onto them, and this isn't even possible for some cards. Very few x86 PCI cards will operate in a Mac without some type of modification.