The really ironic thing is that AOTC addresses 9/11 directly. IT is all about the triumph of evil when people are swayed by politicians for voting for a war/army that will ultimately be turned against them.
Spiderman is about a guy who goes out and fights crime by himself. Ok, but has no relevance to 9/11.
Katz criticizes star wars for doing something spiderman never even tries to do!
Did he even see the movie? Or did he just not understand it at all?
Simple: %33 more theaters = more Boxoffice!
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The Empire Stumbles
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· Score: 2
Its simple, really. Spiderman is playing in almost 4000 theaters. Star Wars is only in 3000.
Lucas' refusal to give his customers a bad experience (by playing in theaters with bad sound and bad projection) results in a lower initial box office... but will proabably result in longer legs.
Katz is the whore here- he sells his integrity by backing a mega-corporation hype machine (Spiderman) against the Independant Film - Star Wars.
Star Wars is made outside hollywood, with no hollywood involvement (FOX only distributes it) totally controlled by Lucas-- his own effects companies, his own sound company, his own production company, his own money.
Star Wars- the whole saga- is the triumph of being true to your vision over selling out to the "we gotta get a sequal out" attitude and pandering to those of poor taste. (So this means that those slashdotters who didn't like star wars are of poor taste?! Well, the version released in 77 had all the same issues: bad acting, a reliance on "cute" characters in the name of R2D2 and C3PO, etc. etc.)
Jon Katz is a sellout, whereas Star Wars is a Blockbuster.
Its pretty sad the contortions people go thru to make the G4 look bad, but comparing it to a processor running at 4 times the clock rate and running really unoptimized code on the G4 will actually make it "look" slow.... to anyone not looking.
Then there's the millions of Mac users out there getting things done a lot faster every day, periodically having to do the same tasks on co-workers PCs and being annoyed (and reminded ) just how slow they are.
Most processors go for MHz over instructions. The G4 does far more instructions per clock-cycle than, say, and Intel processor. So, when comparing processors at teh same clock rate, the G4 should be 2-6 times as fast-- depending on how many instructions are able to fill its pipeline.
This is basic processor design.
Unfortunately, the cult of Intel has wrapped its head around Intel designed benchmarks that, surprise, ignore instruction parallelization, deep pipelines, etc.
You might as well just compare straight MHz as your benchmark for the silliness that you people resort to in claiming your processors are fast.
There's an inherent problem with MM online games. What do you do when too many people congregate in one place? How do you even know if they are all in the same place when there's thousands of people online at the same time? How do you determine this efficiently? The solution to this is difficult but was discovered by me and some others in the mid 90s. This solution was ignored by every game company we tried to get to adopt it (our pricing was pretty reasonable, but game developers have an ego thing about anything they didn't invent themselves) INCLUDING Monolith productions. Eventually the company was sold to Sony, which means that only SONY has the ability to publish a MMORPG that doewsnt' suffer from the horrible performance problems that Ultima Online, Everquest, et al suffer from.
(To my knolwedge no other solution has been discovered, and ours was patented.)
So, what al ot of people do is make it so that there can never be too many people in one place by spreading them over lots of servers, or putting in game limits. In othere words, what you end up with is a 32 player game-- not a MM game!
So, given what I know about this situation (including the multiplayer architects at monolith) this game is going to suck ass.
Which is too bad, because its a great concept and MMORPGs could be a huge gaming genre... but egos, bad marketing notions and a hollywood style of production ("just rip off last years hit and it should work" attitude) have given us a dark ages for video games.
We had the solution before Ultima Online was close to release-- we deomod tens of thousands of players in the same area with NPC objects moving around independantly-- it was pretty amazing, like some of the more massive battle scenes from Return of the Jedi and epidsode 1.
But the gaming industry wasn't willing to use a technology they didn't invent, and so one of them got a monopoly on it. This is not about patents being bad-- this was a worthy breathrough that was made. This is about bad choices leading to bad games.
So, if your MMORPG experience sucks, blame the game developers. Their arrogance killed the solution, and they continue to develop poor solutions thinking you'll buy, as one gaming industry exec said "Shit in a box, if we market it right".
Top ten criticisms about the XServe (if I can come up with ten). 1. It doesn't use SCSI!!!
Weren't you the guy I was arguing with in 1995 about how superior SCSI was to IDE, yet you were whining about how expensive SCSI was and how Macs always cost more because of it?
More specifically: Apple announced a FCAL based drive array at the same time. FCAL is MUCH faster than SCSI. Clearly Apple is offering a competitive solution if you need a serious server, and given the prices NetAppliance and EMC charge, I bet they will be extremely price competitive on this front. (As usual)
2. The G4 os SO SLOW! This is true for people who believe that integer performance is all that matters... but even then, if you do a fair comparison, the G4 gets 2-3 times as much done in a clock cycle. But the reality, these days, is that modern operating systems make extensive use of floating point math, and in this the G4 excels. Hell, the entire UI for Apple will be a 3D rendered surface come the next release, and what isn't off-loaded to the graphics card will be well handled by the G4. The place that integer performance matters a lot is in un-optimized poorly written windowing systems, like Windows and Linux. Those crowds have gone down the path of making poor use of the processor and just buying ever increasing MHz. This puts you further and further behind- as the PowerPC benefits from the same advancements in MHz, the Apple solution gets faster at a much faster rate.
3. I can build a better linux server for half the price! Ok, but it won't be in 1U will it? 1U is an expensive case to buy (with built in sliding rails , remember.) 3U cases were $700 last I looked. Will it have four IDE controllers? Dual Gigabit Ethernet? Dual processors? 2G of RAM? Seems slashdotters often like to compare high end apple hardware to an off the compUSA shelf desktop PC and claim Apple's overpriced. (That is if they actually do a comparison, usually its just an unsupported claim.)
4. Linux is FREE so there's no value in OS X! comaprisons to windows are Silly, NOBODY uses windows!
Right. Actually, Linux is not free in any real sense. Windows has a high cost when you install it, and then ongoing costs every year. Linux has an equivilent cost when you install it and ongoing costs every year. The difference is with linux you pay the cost in labor. If your labor is worth minimum wage, then Linux is a great deal. If it isn't, the increased cost in installation and ongoing maintenance of the software is pretty high. (Though Windows has lower maintenance labor it does have license costs, so Linux is cheaper ongoing.)
OS X on the other hand is no cost to install (if you took off the full retail price of OS X Server the Apple hardware would be a LOT cheaper in the comparison of prices!) and has a lot lower labor cost to maintain the server. GUI server maintenance is worth the cost-- if you value your time above minimum wage.
Don't get me wrong- I don't dislike Linux. I run it on every machine I have that can't run OS X. I just see these servers for the value that they are... and want to bring a happy, productive, less expensive life to you who have forsaken Apple. You deserve to get more done at lower cost too. (Unlike Windows fans, they deserve the torture they get.)
My answer to this was to file for unemployment. If you haven't, you should. Its good money, and you *earned* it because whats being returned is money that was taken from you before. Unemployment is not welfare.
Secondly, start a company. Anyone who's an unemployed geek in the Seattle area, drop me a line. I started a small business (runnable only by me so I can work during the day if I need to). I've found that I'm getting turned down for jobs in part because I put the business I started on the resume-- people think I'm not going to work for them full time.
But that business returns positive cash flow, allowing me to spend money building another, bigger, business. (Which is why I'm looking for fellow entrepreneurial geeks) I've some ideas that will be really big, there isn't the competition there once was for staking out space in the industry-- most companies are shrinking or retreating. Now is the time to boldy go forward and start a.com. (Just don't take VC on bad terms and don't be stupid about your business plan.)
Now is the perfect time to start a company- resources are cheap, from office space to engineers and the competition is not getting off of the ground because most of your would be competitors are going the VC route and finding VC funding hard to come by. (There's a simple solution to this if you need investment- some businesses inherently need investment- but I'm not going to reveal it here.)
Anyway, its a good time to start a company and you should use unemployment to smooth things over.
Plus you won't have a difficult to explain gap on your resume in a couple years.
Outside of a small number of benchmarks that make extensive use of the G4's vector units, the Athlon XP and Pentium 4 are faster than the G4
You called me a liar in your response. And then you said the above. How is excluding floating point performance in order to make your claim not telling a lie? (And then got moderated up for your ad hominum. Hmmm.)
How is excluding floating point performance relevant? Everything that is hard to do these days, that requires a fast CPU, is floating point. Want to support a thousand web browsers? It doesn't matter what CPU you use, your pipe is more important.
Want to MPEG 2 or 4 encode video? Or play a game? Or resequence DNA? You're gonna need floating point.
So, don't call me a liar, and then point to benchmarks designed to highlight x86 performance and ignore floating point performance while you claim the x86 is faster. That's quite a bit of contortions.
The physics doesn't change. Intel has a spare CPU for compatibility, intel has huge die sizes. This makes intel processors slower, more expensive and hotter running, than PowerPCs.
Every time you do a fair comparison for whatever your given task- assuming its CPU intensive- the PowerPC will triumph. Its a law of physics- smaller, faster, cheaper is going to give you a better price for equivalent performance. Or the same price for better performance.
The only reason this myth perseists are that people don't want to admit they paid too much for their PC and a lot of "marketing" about how MHz=performance.
But at 1GHz a PowerPC gets a lot more keys cracked (at distributed.net) than a 1.8GHz Pentium.
I'm going to wander a bit, but I think there's an important point that people are missing. People miss the context of these movies and Lucas has put a very subversive political statement in them- both in how they are made and in the story they tell.
I never quite understood the complaints from the Star Wars "fans" about Phantom Menace. It seems there's a lot of people who wanted A New Hope remade and hated tht Lucas released a movie with a different story! Jar Jar was the lightning rod for this.
But PM was a summer bubble gum movie, JUST LIKE Star Wars originally was.
Lucas has stayed true to his vision with this movie, as we move towards the period in which ANH takes place we can see how we got from PM to ANH.
This movie, shot digitally, and shown digitally, really rocks. It is a compelling argument for digital theater. Its unfortunate that the reviewer is reviewing the movie not as it was meant to be seen-- but film isn't the only issue here. When ships rumbled this morning I felt it in my legs. (Cinerama in Seattle, best theater I've ever been in.) The image was pristine the sound system THX and turned up.
The other is that this is not a Tom Clancy story. This is not a Wim Wenders story. This is not a typical movie saga-- this is Space Opera.
A lot of "fans" seem to have forgotten this. This isn't The Matrix-- they are different categories of movies. Unfortunately, there is so little Science Fiction that all Science Fiction is perceived to be the same genre.
I freely admit that I prefer the style of story and dialogue of Blade Runner and the Matrix over Star Wars-- but Lucas's does his job so well that I have to give his movies the higher marks.
Lucas is telling a Galactic sized story, and only has 270 minutes to do it in. That means each scene must convey a lot of information, and the result is tortured dialog... and even then it feels like there's a whole lot that we don't get to see.
I respect this ambition, and I accept that it means that finding a cast that can convey it is going to be difficult-- especially given the financial, and political constraints on Lucas. Remember, these movies are made outside the hollywood system and without union crews-- and I applaud that. Its the ONLY way to tell the story you want to tell.
Many "fans" seem to forget who the audience for these movies is. It isn't 35 year old computer geeks. Otherwise they wouldn't be popular. The audience is middle america who wants entertainment. And Lucas, consistently, delivers what they want.
That's why we have Jar Jar - kids love him. That's why we have a love story in this movie. (Not to mention it would be hard to conceive Luke and Leia without some love story somewhere.)
And the reason he "compromises" in this way is not just to get the big box office, but to serve his larger, ultimate goal. Notice how much politics there are in these films? There's a really subversive message. One that Marx made (before jumping to foolish conclusions) and most americans ignore, but is extremely poignant these days:
When given the chance, people will trade liberty for security.
Ben Franklin brought this up a long time ago, in a country far far away, and Lucas is making the point again, but a bit too subtly for most people to pick up on it.
Do you trade democracy for the perceived security of a clone army? Regular inspections at airports? Do you concede your inalienable right to self defense and rely on the Jedi? Notice that Amadala is a pretty self sufficient person when the going gets tough.
And when you do, ultimately, as all democracies seem want to do, trade liberty for perceived security, you get neither-- you get an empire.
As we react to being attacked by "seperatists" with increased government control over our lives, we move in the direction of the dark side- of fascism- does it need to be pointed out how similar the empire's soldiers in the first three movies looked like our Nazis? The fixation with Nazis shown in the indiana jones movies?
They do make great villains, especially visually. but there's a lot more going on here.
Hitler was freely elected in Germany. A chancellor, or senator, he was. Germans, after the defeat and Trade Federations imposition at the treaty of versailles, wanted a strong leader. One who would raise an army despite the prohibitions. Hitler was that leader. He raised an army of genetically pure "clones" with rigid behavioral conformity and turned the country into an empire.
Nobody thinks it could happen here, but difficult to see, the dark side is.
"What does having an Apple server gain you that having an Intel/Linux server wouldn't?"
1. Quality Server Admin Apps. 2. High CPU performance in a 1U space. 3. Less expensive than other companies rackmount servers. 4. Better support, better quality control. Apple guarantees the hardware will work with the software. With linux, you never know. 5. OSX- Cocoa is the best app development environement, bar none. If you are developing enterprise applications, that's the environment to do it in, and this is the server to host them on. 6. WEBOBJECTS. 7. 3 PCI slots, 2 processros, 4 drive bays in 1 Rack Unit. Nobody else has this.
Apple releases a $4000 1U server and you say x86 hardware is cheaper and faster?
I'm perplexed that such mythology remains-- how can people continue to think this despite the fact that the powerPC has been beating the pentium in every reasonable performace comparison for years, and at half the cost.
The is almost a law of physics-- the PPC is a risc chip while the pentium is a risc chip with a 386 compatibility processor running emulation software. Therefore the die is a quarter the size -- which means it costs 1/8th as much and the speed is much much faster.
Hell, it even has a dedicated floating point vector unit, which the pentium doesnt (MMX was quite a failure.)
This means Apple gets faster processors for a lot less money, which allows them to release servers like this one with more performance for less money than you can get from any quality x86 manufacturer.
The Dell PowerEdge1650, the closest comperable machine from Dell, has fewer drive bays, half the drive capacity, NO-hot swappable drives, dual processors (which are SLOWER than the PowerPCs), dual gigabit ethernet, 512MB Ram, the remote management card (Which is free for apple, extra for dell), RedHat, and standard support is $6,341.00.
So, %50 more expensive with less capacity, and SLOWER PROCESSORS.
Every time apple releases new hardware, some x86 fan goes on and on about how expensive it is, and every time I make this comparison in response and find the same thing-- it costs a lot more and you get a lot less when you go Dell, Compaq, HP, etc.
You say you can get a server from Dell with RAID for less, and you run Win2000?
Hmmm. Since Win2000 will charge you $3295 for unlimited users, that means you must be able to get a Dell for $605? I looked on the Dell website and couldn't find a $605 server.
Oh, and the Xserve DOES have raid.
Seriously, you run Windows, you pay the user tax and you're concerned about cost- when your user tax is almost as much as the complete server from Apple?
This is a really competitive server from a hardware standpoint. When you include the software costs (and you did since you run Win2000) there is no comparison.
Your alternative is at least twice the cost (And when I go to the Dell website their servers are a lot more expensive than the Xserve for less CPU horsepower and multiple-rack units.)
Funny, pointing out that Intels step down to 1/4 clock rate is a "troll" but claiming that Macs do, when they actually don't is not a troll.
Seems the moderation is unbiased.
The 600Mhz iBook does not run at 500MHz, it runs at 600MHz. Your Pentium runs at 250MHz, not 727MHz.
Nevermine that a 600MHz G3 even is faster than a 1GHz pentium anyway.
You guys can deny these facts, but they are easily availible at the processor manufacturers websites... go ahead and moderate me down as a troll, but we both know the truth is availible 24/7 for download from intel.com and motorola.com.
Yes, I must be trolling since I proclaim that the emperor has no clothes. I simply cannot fathom the offense you people take when I keep pointing it out, but all you have to do is look. Get a Dell catalog, get an Apple catalog and compare prices of equivalent machines.
But I know you won't look. Denial is necessairy so you don't feel embarrased at paying too much for too little computer.
What do you expect from a company that says it is easier to eject media by jamming a bent paperclip in a pinhole than it is to press a button. A company that tries to make even the most basic part of the user interface (the power button) obtuse and hard to find.
Ah, so YOU are trolling. Everyone knows that macs have ejected floppies with the push of a button, or mouse click, since 1984. Whereas with PCs you have to do it manually.... And of course, from the perspective of a PC user putting the power key on the keyboardi s obtuse and hard to find, not like putting it plainly marked on the back of the computer. I think PCs have power keys on they keyboard now, about a decade after apple started doing it.
9 out of 10 users reject the experience and the UI.
Which is, of course, factually untrue. In every study done, the vast majority of users, when given a choice, preferred the Mac UI it the Linux/Windows UI (since Linux copied windows). That 3/4ths of the computer users out there run Windows, rather than MacOS says more for the power of monopoly than that they have "rejected" the Mac-- they've never used a mac.
Anyone who buys their grandmother a PC is in either serious denail, or is simply ignorant (ie: hasn't been exposed) about the Macintosh.
There are no Flat panel PCs in the price range of hte iMac. Apple has been providing better quality, cheaper computers for a decade.
The only reason I can think of for your to not be buying them is masochism.
That's good. I rejected RMS and FSF from *my* certification many years ago when they called for a boycott of Apple (but not Microsoft) for not releasing their source code.
Apple doesn't pretend that its in the free-software business, other than the fact that they have done more to support free software than Stallman has during the 90s. (The 80s are another matter).
Apples open source software is open source.
RMS has stated his non-belief in intellectual property, and I suspect this is underlied by a non-belief in real property.
But the rest of the world realizes that Open Source allows people to make money and use some of that money to contribute back to the software, so everyone does better.
Economically, Free (as in BSD) and Open (as in Open) source software will always beat closed (as in RMS and FSF) software that doesn't let you use it in proprietary work. This is the equivilent of Microsofts "we own it and you can't use it, unless you're using it for our profit".
Stallman made the mistake of trying to force everyone to believe as he did, and as you seek, the freer environments are flourishing while the GPL is on the wane. The only reason stallman is still around is he had many years of head start-- but pretty soon, Apple alone will have released more truely-free code than he has.
People who wonder about whether apple is giving back to the community seem to ignore that they open sourced their entire Os. Is the ocmmunity giving back to apple?
Never mind the fact that they open-sourced a streaming media player, when the market says these are worht $8,000 a year per stream capacity.
In every area where apple is using open source, they have contributed changes. Can you say that about yourself?
And on top of that, they have open sourced new technologies, and old ones a like.
Every point you made was excellent, except for the last one.
The only "myth" about performance is that the speed of the processor is the speed of its clock. this is false. Given that a PowerPC does so many instructions in a given clock cycle, its very easy for an 800MHz PPC chip to exceed the performance of a 1.8GHz Intel chip. (And I'm an intel share holder, but not a motorola one. I know where the money is, but I recognize that the product that makes the most money is not the better one, paralleling the OS world.)
Look a the distributed.net results. Look an any reasonable, rational comparison.
Try to encode MPEG -2 in real time on a PC box, then try it on a Mac. What will you see?
If you run software that actually uses the PowerPC's processing capabilities, you have the fastest X on the planet. Apple ships the fastest laptop on the planet (even more so since a 1GHz laptop using Intel actually runs at 250MHz when on battery power.) The fastest desktop for the price, etc. etc.
Also, I heard that SGI was goign to the PowerPC, but I have not been able to confirm that rumor.
The competition is dying-- alpha which got far less done per a clock than the intel, is dead. AMD can barely keep afloat, and has no path out of the position of depending on Intel, MIPs is dead. Even Merced seems stillborn. PA-RISC is dead. UltraSparc seems dead.
All of these processors were killed by the either the market control of Intel, or the speed superiority of Motorola. Many who relied on them switched to Intel hardware, rather than PowerPC, but the PowerPC still rules the power domain.
Ok, as apparently the ONLY person here who was actually AT the Pixar "announcement" its time to dispell some false assumptions.
First off, this wasn't an announcement. This was one guy at WWDC telling a bunch of developers about how Pixar goes about making movies. He did that and he also talked about OSX. He showed an app he developed in OS X in 10 days that was pretty cool and useful to Pixar. He sung the praises of OS X and said that Pixar has been using OS X more and more.
He mentioned, and showed a picture, with all the linux and sun machines in the renderfarm.
He dispelled the rumor that had been going around that Pixar was going to announce Renderman for OS X (but gave no indication which way whether it was a possibility.)
Jobs did not lay down the law to make Pixar switch. IT hasn't even switched, or announced switching. It has only said that its using OS X more and more, and that the guy on stage was persnally loooking forward to the new rackmounted servers.
Also, Jobs DOES own pixar. That is, as much as anyone who owns a public company can. He owned it outright before it went public. So, whateve the public and employees don't own is owned by him. After getting fired by apple (Almost a death warrent for apple) he learned his lesson.
So, while he could lay down an "edict" this is the kind of conspiracy theory that online geeks like to engage in, as it makes it easier to ignore the reality that the better product won.
The Mac hardware packs far more punch in a given amount of space (with rackmount cases, anyway) than any other os/hardware combination out there, other that *possibly* Sun boxes that cost a whole lot more.
It is also provides the best development environemnts- bar none- currently shipping. Hell, it has top of hte line support for Java development, Objc/Cocoa, Classic development, and Unix tools.
And, it also is worth pointing out that while Microsoft and Apple both announced "object oriented operating systems" way back in 1991, in 2001 Apple actually delivered one. Yes, next delivered it before, but the power of OO in the OS is really rapid, quality app development. something that, unfortunately, linux will never have,given its develoepers preferences for 1970s era development styles. (I'm talking vi/emacs and proceedural OS layers)
But I digress. You guys should be busy going out and figuring out how to get redezvous in to Linux- an Apple technology apple is encouraging you to copy- than worrying abou the fact that OS X stole a major customer win from Linux. Get used to that- its the natural result of picking the Windows Lookand feel for your windowing system, among other things.
For the same cash, you ALWAYS get a better mac than PC. Every time I've done a comparison, if you look at a Dell, Gateway, IBM, or other non-fly-by-night manufacturer, you spend about twice as much as you would for a mac with comperabe specifications (I'm talking about hardware.) When you factor in the fact that the mac is about 4-6 times as fast at speed intensive things, you find that the mac is a much better deal on a price preformace scale.
Given that the largest installed base of open source software is on the Mac, and that the non-open source stuff kicks every other OS out there-- better video than real, better graphics than any desktop,(OpenGL implementation), faster application development, a vastly superior UI,etc. etc. I find it shocking that so many slashdot readers- obstensibly people that support opensource- continue to repeat the myths and outright lies spread by the evil empire.
Get a Mac. Run Linux on it if you want, dual boot with darwin and OSX if you want. But get one and see what it is that you're missing.
Only be evading actually using one or getting informed about the technology involved can you continue to hold the worldview you represent here on slashdot (and get moderated up for... hmmm.)
Why is Gosling, Joy, and every other big name unix guy I know not intimately involved with linux development of going to the Mac? The titanium powerbook, and other great hardware.
As I heard Gosling say yesterday "Mac OS X is unix with quality control and taste."
Well, that 399 poud emachine is a $800 computer here in the US.
Given the addtional costs of going that route, you would easily eat up the $100 difference. It costs 2-5 times as much in total cost of ownership for a Wintel machine than it does for a Mac. So, really you'd be paying at least twice as much over the lifetime of the machine in cables, replacing video cards, dealing with faulty power supplies, etc.
And you'd end up with LESS COMPUTER. The eMac is faster, and probably exceeds that eMachine in every releavant performance spec. they always have whenever I've done a comparison.
The ONLY reason Wintel machines look like good deals is that tehy claim higher clockrate. Nevermind that they are slower processors, they run at a higher clockrate so they are "faster". NOT
What does apple give users for the price premium you pay for thier computers?
There is NO price premium. There hasn't been one for a bout a decade. Find a PC that is equivilent and you'll discover it costs 2-3 times as much.
What you get is a faster machine, better quality hardware (ie: things actually WORK) better software, the largest selling open source OS in existance, the best UI in existance and consequently the best user experience in existance, and you get all of this for hundreds of dollars less than it would cost you to buy a closed source, 1974 era technology intel-processor based PC.
It takes a lot of evasion to continually pretend that this isn't the case... and a lot of ignorance about how computers work. Like the fact that intel processors cut the clock speed to a quarter when operating on battery power, etc. etc.
A lot of home users don't want LCDs either, but they aren't given a choice
Uh, the CRT based iMac is still for sale on Apples website. You you can run any VGA monitor your want with a PowerMac. don't want a new powermac? Can't afford it cause you're so po? Go buy a used Mac.
You have the choice. Whatever you really want, you can get from Apple. They do make machines focused on what most people want. but if you want an 800MHz G4 with a CRT monitor, go buy a used PowerMac.
Or just keep making up excuses to avoid switching to the best hardware provider out there.
An 800MHz PowerPC processor runs at 800 MHz. IT does more calculations becuase of wider datapaths and a modern design than an 800MHz Intel chip. It is FASTER.
Secondly, on a laptop there is no such thing as a 1GHz Intel chip. Why? Because when you're not plugged in, that chip runs at 250MHz or slower.
Intel chips cannot run low power at 1GHz, they are too big, and to complicated and draw too much power.
So, you're actually whining that Apple doen't have a 200MHz processor in their laptop, which you'd prefer over the 800MHz processor they do have?
... according to you people. Is 800MHz worth that much more than 667? You ask?
Well, as if that's the only difference. PC people are so fixated on MHz, they ignore everything else-- I swear these people would buy a car with no wheels because the engine was 8 cylinder rather than 4.
The LCD is a bigger one, with a higher resolution. the cache is the largest availible on a laptop anywhere. It now comes with gigabit ethernet and more video out options, etc. etc. etc.
I bet most PC laptop people don't realize that A PowerPC runs at 800MHz even on battery while a Pentium runs at 200MHz on battery.
The "macs are more expensive" myth has been around for ages.
But since 1990, if you compare a mac to a PC similarly equipped, you find tht the mac is cheaper and faster. Or, if you find a PC that is as fast, you find that the mac is about HALF the cost!
The powperPC advantage lets you buy a high end computer for low end prices.
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The really ironic thing is that AOTC addresses 9/11 directly. IT is all about the triumph of evil when people are swayed by politicians for voting for a war/army that will ultimately be turned against them.
Spiderman is about a guy who goes out and fights crime by himself. Ok, but has no relevance to 9/11.
Katz criticizes star wars for doing something spiderman never even tries to do!
Did he even see the movie? Or did he just not understand it at all?
Its simple, really. Spiderman is playing in almost 4000 theaters. Star Wars is only in 3000.
Lucas' refusal to give his customers a bad experience (by playing in theaters with bad sound and bad projection) results in a lower initial box office... but will proabably result in longer legs.
Katz is the whore here- he sells his integrity by backing a mega-corporation hype machine (Spiderman) against the Independant Film - Star Wars.
Star Wars is made outside hollywood, with no hollywood involvement (FOX only distributes it) totally controlled by Lucas-- his own effects companies, his own sound company, his own production company, his own money.
Star Wars- the whole saga- is the triumph of being true to your vision over selling out to the "we gotta get a sequal out" attitude and pandering to those of poor taste. (So this means that those slashdotters who didn't like star wars are of poor taste?! Well, the version released in 77 had all the same issues: bad acting, a reliance on "cute" characters in the name of R2D2 and C3PO, etc. etc.)
Jon Katz is a sellout, whereas Star Wars is a Blockbuster.
Which is, of course, not true.
Its pretty sad the contortions people go thru to make the G4 look bad, but comparing it to a processor running at 4 times the clock rate and running really unoptimized code on the G4 will actually make it "look" slow.... to anyone not looking.
Then there's the millions of Mac users out there getting things done a lot faster every day, periodically having to do the same tasks on co-workers PCs and being annoyed (and reminded ) just how slow they are.
Most processors go for MHz over instructions. The G4 does far more instructions per clock-cycle than, say, and Intel processor. So, when comparing processors at teh same clock rate, the G4 should be 2-6 times as fast-- depending on how many instructions are able to fill its pipeline.
This is basic processor design.
Unfortunately, the cult of Intel has wrapped its head around Intel designed benchmarks that, surprise, ignore instruction parallelization, deep pipelines, etc.
You might as well just compare straight MHz as your benchmark for the silliness that you people resort to in claiming your processors are fast.
There's an inherent problem with MM online games. What do you do when too many people congregate in one place? How do you even know if they are all in the same place when there's thousands of people online at the same time? How do you determine this efficiently? The solution to this is difficult but was discovered by me and some others in the mid 90s. This solution was ignored by every game company we tried to get to adopt it (our pricing was pretty reasonable, but game developers have an ego thing about anything they didn't invent themselves) INCLUDING Monolith productions. Eventually the company was sold to Sony, which means that only SONY has the ability to publish a MMORPG that doewsnt' suffer from the horrible performance problems that Ultima Online, Everquest, et al suffer from.
(To my knolwedge no other solution has been discovered, and ours was patented.)
So, what al ot of people do is make it so that there can never be too many people in one place by spreading them over lots of servers, or putting in game limits. In othere words, what you end up with is a 32 player game-- not a MM game!
So, given what I know about this situation (including the multiplayer architects at monolith) this game is going to suck ass.
Which is too bad, because its a great concept and MMORPGs could be a huge gaming genre... but egos, bad marketing notions and a hollywood style of production ("just rip off last years hit and it should work" attitude) have given us a dark ages for video games.
We had the solution before Ultima Online was close to release-- we deomod tens of thousands of players in the same area with NPC objects moving around independantly-- it was pretty amazing, like some of the more massive battle scenes from Return of the Jedi and epidsode 1.
But the gaming industry wasn't willing to use a technology they didn't invent, and so one of them got a monopoly on it. This is not about patents being bad-- this was a worthy breathrough that was made. This is about bad choices leading to bad games.
So, if your MMORPG experience sucks, blame the game developers. Their arrogance killed the solution, and they continue to develop poor solutions thinking you'll buy, as one gaming industry exec said "Shit in a box, if we market it right".
Top ten criticisms about the XServe (if I can come up with ten).
1. It doesn't use SCSI!!!
Weren't you the guy I was arguing with in 1995 about how superior SCSI was to IDE, yet you were whining about how expensive SCSI was and how Macs always cost more because of it?
More specifically: Apple announced a FCAL based drive array at the same time. FCAL is MUCH faster than SCSI. Clearly Apple is offering a competitive solution if you need a serious server, and given the prices NetAppliance and EMC charge, I bet they will be extremely price competitive on this front. (As usual)
2. The G4 os SO SLOW!
This is true for people who believe that integer performance is all that matters... but even then, if you do a fair comparison, the G4 gets 2-3 times as much done in a clock cycle. But the reality, these days, is that modern operating systems make extensive use of floating point math, and in this the G4 excels. Hell, the entire UI for Apple will be a 3D rendered surface come the next release, and what isn't off-loaded to the graphics card will be well handled by the G4. The place that integer performance matters a lot is in un-optimized poorly written windowing systems, like Windows and Linux. Those crowds have gone down the path of making poor use of the processor and just buying ever increasing MHz. This puts you further and further behind- as the PowerPC benefits from the same advancements in MHz, the Apple solution gets faster at a much faster rate.
3. I can build a better linux server for half the price!
Ok, but it won't be in 1U will it? 1U is an expensive case to buy (with built in sliding rails , remember.) 3U cases were $700 last I looked. Will it have four IDE controllers? Dual Gigabit Ethernet? Dual processors? 2G of RAM? Seems slashdotters often like to compare high end apple hardware to an off the compUSA shelf desktop PC and claim Apple's overpriced. (That is if they actually do a comparison, usually its just an unsupported claim.)
4. Linux is FREE so there's no value in OS X! comaprisons to windows are Silly, NOBODY uses windows!
Right. Actually, Linux is not free in any real sense. Windows has a high cost when you install it, and then ongoing costs every year. Linux has an equivilent cost when you install it and ongoing costs every year. The difference is with linux you pay the cost in labor. If your labor is worth minimum wage, then Linux is a great deal. If it isn't, the increased cost in installation and ongoing maintenance of the software is pretty high. (Though Windows has lower maintenance labor it does have license costs, so Linux is cheaper ongoing.)
OS X on the other hand is no cost to install (if you took off the full retail price of OS X Server the Apple hardware would be a LOT cheaper in the comparison of prices!) and has a lot lower labor cost to maintain the server. GUI server maintenance is worth the cost-- if you value your time above minimum wage.
Don't get me wrong- I don't dislike Linux. I run it on every machine I have that can't run OS X. I just see these servers for the value that they are... and want to bring a happy, productive, less expensive life to you who have forsaken Apple. You deserve to get more done at lower cost too. (Unlike Windows fans, they deserve the torture they get.)
My answer to this was to file for unemployment. If you haven't, you should. Its good money, and you *earned* it because whats being returned is money that was taken from you before. Unemployment is not welfare.
Secondly, start a company. Anyone who's an unemployed geek in the Seattle area, drop me a line. I started a small business (runnable only by me so I can work during the day if I need to). I've found that I'm getting turned down for jobs in part because I put the business I started on the resume-- people think I'm not going to work for them full time.
But that business returns positive cash flow, allowing me to spend money building another, bigger, business. (Which is why I'm looking for fellow entrepreneurial geeks) I've some ideas that will be really big, there isn't the competition there once was for staking out space in the industry-- most companies are shrinking or retreating. Now is the time to boldy go forward and start a
Now is the perfect time to start a company- resources are cheap, from office space to engineers and the competition is not getting off of the ground because most of your would be competitors are going the VC route and finding VC funding hard to come by. (There's a simple solution to this if you need investment- some businesses inherently need investment- but I'm not going to reveal it here.)
Anyway, its a good time to start a company and you should use unemployment to smooth things over.
Plus you won't have a difficult to explain gap on your resume in a couple years.
Outside of a small number of benchmarks that make extensive use of the G4's vector units, the Athlon XP and Pentium 4 are faster than the G4
You called me a liar in your response. And then you said the above. How is excluding floating point performance in order to make your claim not telling a lie? (And then got moderated up for your ad hominum. Hmmm.)
How is excluding floating point performance relevant? Everything that is hard to do these days, that requires a fast CPU, is floating point. Want to support a thousand web browsers? It doesn't matter what CPU you use, your pipe is more important.
Want to MPEG 2 or 4 encode video? Or play a game? Or resequence DNA? You're gonna need floating point.
So, don't call me a liar, and then point to benchmarks designed to highlight x86 performance and ignore floating point performance while you claim the x86 is faster. That's quite a bit of contortions.
The physics doesn't change. Intel has a spare CPU for compatibility, intel has huge die sizes. This makes intel processors slower, more expensive and hotter running, than PowerPCs.
Every time you do a fair comparison for whatever your given task- assuming its CPU intensive- the PowerPC will triumph. Its a law of physics- smaller, faster, cheaper is going to give you a better price for equivalent performance. Or the same price for better performance.
The only reason this myth perseists are that people don't want to admit they paid too much for their PC and a lot of "marketing" about how MHz=performance.
But at 1GHz a PowerPC gets a lot more keys cracked (at distributed.net) than a 1.8GHz Pentium.
Chew on that.
I'm going to wander a bit, but I think there's an important point that people are missing. People miss the context of these movies and Lucas has put a very subversive political statement in them- both in how they are made and in the story they tell.
I never quite understood the complaints from the Star Wars "fans" about Phantom Menace. It seems there's a lot of people who wanted A New Hope remade and hated tht Lucas released a movie with a different story! Jar Jar was the lightning rod for this.
But PM was a summer bubble gum movie, JUST LIKE Star Wars originally was.
Lucas has stayed true to his vision with this movie, as we move towards the period in which ANH takes place we can see how we got from PM to ANH.
This movie, shot digitally, and shown digitally, really rocks. It is a compelling argument for digital theater. Its unfortunate that the reviewer is reviewing the movie not as it was meant to be seen-- but film isn't the only issue here. When ships rumbled this morning I felt it in my legs. (Cinerama in Seattle, best theater I've ever been in.) The image was pristine the sound system THX and turned up.
The other is that this is not a Tom Clancy story. This is not a Wim Wenders story. This is not a typical movie saga-- this is Space Opera.
A lot of "fans" seem to have forgotten this. This isn't The Matrix-- they are different categories of movies. Unfortunately, there is so little Science Fiction that all Science Fiction is perceived to be the same genre.
I freely admit that I prefer the style of story and dialogue of Blade Runner and the Matrix over Star Wars-- but Lucas's does his job so well that I have to give his movies the higher marks.
Lucas is telling a Galactic sized story, and only has 270 minutes to do it in. That means each scene must convey a lot of information, and the result is tortured dialog... and even then it feels like there's a whole lot that we don't get to see.
I respect this ambition, and I accept that it means that finding a cast that can convey it is going to be difficult-- especially given the financial, and political constraints on Lucas. Remember, these movies are made outside the hollywood system and without union crews-- and I applaud that. Its the ONLY way to tell the story you want to tell.
Many "fans" seem to forget who the audience for these movies is. It isn't 35 year old computer geeks. Otherwise they wouldn't be popular. The audience is middle america who wants entertainment. And Lucas, consistently, delivers what they want.
That's why we have Jar Jar - kids love him. That's why we have a love story in this movie. (Not to mention it would be hard to conceive Luke and Leia without some love story somewhere.)
And the reason he "compromises" in this way is not just to get the big box office, but to serve his larger, ultimate goal. Notice how much politics there are in these films? There's a really subversive message. One that Marx made (before jumping to foolish conclusions) and most americans ignore, but is extremely poignant these days:
When given the chance, people will trade liberty for security.
Ben Franklin brought this up a long time ago, in a country far far away, and Lucas is making the point again, but a bit too subtly for most people to pick up on it.
Do you trade democracy for the perceived security of a clone army? Regular inspections at airports? Do you concede your inalienable right to self defense and rely on the Jedi? Notice that Amadala is a pretty self sufficient person when the going gets tough.
And when you do, ultimately, as all democracies seem want to do, trade liberty for perceived security, you get neither-- you get an empire.
As we react to being attacked by "seperatists" with increased government control over our lives, we move in the direction of the dark side- of fascism- does it need to be pointed out how similar the empire's soldiers in the first three movies looked like our Nazis? The fixation with Nazis shown in the indiana jones movies?
They do make great villains, especially visually. but there's a lot more going on here.
Hitler was freely elected in Germany. A chancellor, or senator, he was. Germans, after the defeat and Trade Federations imposition at the treaty of versailles, wanted a strong leader. One who would raise an army despite the prohibitions. Hitler was that leader. He raised an army of genetically pure "clones" with rigid behavioral conformity and turned the country into an empire.
Nobody thinks it could happen here, but difficult to see, the dark side is.
BitGeek
"What does having an Apple server gain you that having an Intel/Linux server wouldn't?"
1. Quality Server Admin Apps.
2. High CPU performance in a 1U space.
3. Less expensive than other companies rackmount servers.
4. Better support, better quality control. Apple guarantees the hardware will work with the software. With linux, you never know.
5. OSX- Cocoa is the best app development environement, bar none. If you are developing enterprise applications, that's the environment to do it in, and this is the server to host them on.
6. WEBOBJECTS.
7. 3 PCI slots, 2 processros, 4 drive bays in 1 Rack Unit. Nobody else has this.
Oh, and it ain't butt ugly.
Apple releases a $4000 1U server and you say x86 hardware is cheaper and faster?
I'm perplexed that such mythology remains-- how can people continue to think this despite the fact that the powerPC has been beating the pentium in every reasonable performace comparison for years, and at half the cost.
The is almost a law of physics-- the PPC is a risc chip while the pentium is a risc chip with a 386 compatibility processor running emulation software. Therefore the die is a quarter the size -- which means it costs 1/8th as much and the speed is much much faster.
Hell, it even has a dedicated floating point vector unit, which the pentium doesnt (MMX was quite a failure.)
This means Apple gets faster processors for a lot less money, which allows them to release servers like this one with more performance for less money than you can get from any quality x86 manufacturer.
The Dell PowerEdge1650, the closest comperable machine from Dell, has fewer drive bays, half the drive capacity, NO-hot swappable drives, dual processors (which are SLOWER than the PowerPCs), dual gigabit ethernet, 512MB Ram, the remote management card (Which is free for apple, extra for dell), RedHat, and standard support is $6,341.00.
So, %50 more expensive with less capacity, and SLOWER PROCESSORS.
Every time apple releases new hardware, some x86 fan goes on and on about how expensive it is, and every time I make this comparison in response and find the same thing-- it costs a lot more and you get a lot less when you go Dell, Compaq, HP, etc.
You say you can get a server from Dell with RAID for less, and you run Win2000?
Hmmm. Since Win2000 will charge you $3295 for unlimited users, that means you must be able to get a Dell for $605? I looked on the Dell website and couldn't find a $605 server.
Oh, and the Xserve DOES have raid.
Seriously, you run Windows, you pay the user tax and you're concerned about cost- when your user tax is almost as much as the complete server from Apple?
This is a really competitive server from a hardware standpoint. When you include the software costs (and you did since you run Win2000) there is no comparison.
Your alternative is at least twice the cost (And when I go to the Dell website their servers are a lot more expensive than the Xserve for less CPU horsepower and multiple-rack units.)
Funny, pointing out that Intels step down to 1/4 clock rate is a "troll" but claiming that Macs do, when they actually don't is not a troll.
Seems the moderation is unbiased.
The 600Mhz iBook does not run at 500MHz, it runs at 600MHz. Your Pentium runs at 250MHz, not 727MHz.
Nevermine that a 600MHz G3 even is faster than a 1GHz pentium anyway.
You guys can deny these facts, but they are easily availible at the processor manufacturers websites... go ahead and moderate me down as a troll, but we both know the truth is availible 24/7 for download from intel.com and motorola.com.
Yes, pretend the PowerMac G4 doesn't exist and the iBook and Powerbook G4 don't exist.
Are all PC users practicing consistant denial of reality to justify their platform choices? Why is that?
Especially when these same people seem to dislike microsoft.... yet they keep giving them money. I don't understand that level of denail.
It is the other way around actually.
Yes, I must be trolling since I proclaim that the emperor has no clothes. I simply cannot fathom the offense you people take when I keep pointing it out, but all you have to do is look. Get a Dell catalog, get an Apple catalog and compare prices of equivalent machines.
But I know you won't look. Denial is necessairy so you don't feel embarrased at paying too much for too little computer.
What do you expect from a company that says it is easier to eject media by jamming a bent paperclip in a pinhole than it is to press a button. A company that tries to make even the most basic part of the user interface (the power button) obtuse and hard to find.
Ah, so YOU are trolling. Everyone knows that macs have ejected floppies with the push of a button, or mouse click, since 1984. Whereas with PCs you have to do it manually.... And of course, from the perspective of a PC user putting the power key on the keyboardi s obtuse and hard to find, not like putting it plainly marked on the back of the computer. I think PCs have power keys on they keyboard now, about a decade after apple started doing it.
9 out of 10 users reject the experience and the UI.
Which is, of course, factually untrue. In every study done, the vast majority of users, when given a choice, preferred the Mac UI it the Linux/Windows UI (since Linux copied windows). That 3/4ths of the computer users out there run Windows, rather than MacOS says more for the power of monopoly than that they have "rejected" the Mac-- they've never used a mac.
Anyone who buys their grandmother a PC is in either serious denail, or is simply ignorant (ie: hasn't been exposed) about the Macintosh.
There are no Flat panel PCs in the price range of hte iMac. Apple has been providing better quality, cheaper computers for a decade.
The only reason I can think of for your to not be buying them is masochism.
That's good. I rejected RMS and FSF from *my* certification many years ago when they called for a boycott of Apple (but not Microsoft) for not releasing their source code.
Apple doesn't pretend that its in the free-software business, other than the fact that they have done more to support free software than Stallman has during the 90s. (The 80s are another matter).
Apples open source software is open source.
RMS has stated his non-belief in intellectual property, and I suspect this is underlied by a non-belief in real property.
But the rest of the world realizes that Open Source allows people to make money and use some of that money to contribute back to the software, so everyone does better.
Economically, Free (as in BSD) and Open (as in Open) source software will always beat closed (as in RMS and FSF) software that doesn't let you use it in proprietary work. This is the equivilent of Microsofts "we own it and you can't use it, unless you're using it for our profit".
Stallman made the mistake of trying to force everyone to believe as he did, and as you seek, the freer environments are flourishing while the GPL is on the wane. The only reason stallman is still around is he had many years of head start-- but pretty soon, Apple alone will have released more truely-free code than he has.
People who wonder about whether apple is giving back to the community seem to ignore that they open sourced their entire Os. Is the ocmmunity giving back to apple?
Never mind the fact that they open-sourced a streaming media player, when the market says these are worht $8,000 a year per stream capacity.
In every area where apple is using open source, they have contributed changes. Can you say that about yourself?
And on top of that, they have open sourced new technologies, and old ones a like.
Rendezvous is revolutionary.
Every point you made was excellent, except for the last one.
.
The only "myth" about performance is that the speed of the processor is the speed of its clock. this is false. Given that a PowerPC does so many instructions in a given clock cycle, its very easy for an 800MHz PPC chip to exceed the performance of a 1.8GHz Intel chip. (And I'm an intel share holder, but not a motorola one. I know where the money is, but I recognize that the product that makes the most money is not the better one, paralleling the OS world.)
Look a the distributed.net results. Look an any reasonable, rational comparison.
Try to encode MPEG -2 in real time on a PC box, then try it on a Mac. What will you see?
If you run software that actually uses the PowerPC's processing capabilities, you have the fastest X on the planet. Apple ships the fastest laptop on the planet (even more so since a 1GHz laptop using Intel actually runs at 250MHz when on battery power.) The fastest desktop for the price, etc. etc.
Also, I heard that SGI was goign to the PowerPC, but I have not been able to confirm that rumor
The competition is dying-- alpha which got far less done per a clock than the intel, is dead. AMD can barely keep afloat, and has no path out of the position of depending on Intel, MIPs is dead. Even Merced seems stillborn. PA-RISC is dead. UltraSparc seems dead.
All of these processors were killed by the either the market control of Intel, or the speed superiority of Motorola. Many who relied on them switched to Intel hardware, rather than PowerPC, but the PowerPC still rules the power domain.
Ok, as apparently the ONLY person here who was actually AT the Pixar "announcement" its time to dispell some false assumptions.
,given its develoepers preferences for 1970s era development styles. (I'm talking vi/emacs and proceedural OS layers)
First off, this wasn't an announcement. This was one guy at WWDC telling a bunch of developers about how Pixar goes about making movies. He did that and he also talked about OSX. He showed an app he developed in OS X in 10 days that was pretty cool and useful to Pixar. He sung the praises of OS X and said that Pixar has been using OS X more and more.
He mentioned, and showed a picture, with all the linux and sun machines in the renderfarm.
He dispelled the rumor that had been going around that Pixar was going to announce Renderman for OS X (but gave no indication which way whether it was a possibility.)
Jobs did not lay down the law to make Pixar switch. IT hasn't even switched, or announced switching. It has only said that its using OS X more and more, and that the guy on stage was persnally loooking forward to the new rackmounted servers.
Also, Jobs DOES own pixar. That is, as much as anyone who owns a public company can. He owned it outright before it went public. So, whateve the public and employees don't own is owned by him. After getting fired by apple (Almost a death warrent for apple) he learned his lesson.
So, while he could lay down an "edict" this is the kind of conspiracy theory that online geeks like to engage in, as it makes it easier to ignore the reality that the better product won.
The Mac hardware packs far more punch in a given amount of space (with rackmount cases, anyway) than any other os/hardware combination out there, other that *possibly* Sun boxes that cost a whole lot more.
It is also provides the best development environemnts- bar none- currently shipping. Hell, it has top of hte line support for Java development, Objc/Cocoa, Classic development, and Unix tools.
And, it also is worth pointing out that while Microsoft and Apple both announced "object oriented operating systems" way back in 1991, in 2001 Apple actually delivered one. Yes, next delivered it before, but the power of OO in the OS is really rapid, quality app development. something that, unfortunately, linux will never have
But I digress. You guys should be busy going out and figuring out how to get redezvous in to Linux- an Apple technology apple is encouraging you to copy- than worrying abou the fact that OS X stole a major customer win from Linux. Get used to that- its the natural result of picking the Windows Lookand feel for your windowing system, among other things.
For the same cash, you ALWAYS get a better mac than PC. Every time I've done a comparison, if you look at a Dell, Gateway, IBM, or other non-fly-by-night manufacturer, you spend about twice as much as you would for a mac with comperabe specifications (I'm talking about hardware.) When you factor in the fact that the mac is about 4-6 times as fast at speed intensive things, you find that the mac is a much better deal on a price preformace scale.
Given that the largest installed base of open source software is on the Mac, and that the non-open source stuff kicks every other OS out there-- better video than real, better graphics than any desktop,(OpenGL implementation), faster application development, a vastly superior UI,etc. etc. I find it shocking that so many slashdot readers- obstensibly people that support opensource- continue to repeat the myths and outright lies spread by the evil empire.
Get a Mac. Run Linux on it if you want, dual boot with darwin and OSX if you want. But get one and see what it is that you're missing.
Only be evading actually using one or getting informed about the technology involved can you continue to hold the worldview you represent here on slashdot (and get moderated up for... hmmm.)
Why is Gosling, Joy, and every other big name unix guy I know not intimately involved with linux development of going to the Mac? The titanium powerbook, and other great hardware.
As I heard Gosling say yesterday "Mac OS X is unix with quality control and taste."
BitGeek
Well, that 399 poud emachine is a $800 computer here in the US.
Given the addtional costs of going that route, you would easily eat up the $100 difference. It costs 2-5 times as much in total cost of ownership for a Wintel machine than it does for a Mac. So, really you'd be paying at least twice as much over the lifetime of the machine in cables, replacing video cards, dealing with faulty power supplies, etc.
And you'd end up with LESS COMPUTER. The eMac is faster, and probably exceeds that eMachine in every releavant performance spec. they always have whenever I've done a comparison.
The ONLY reason Wintel machines look like good deals is that tehy claim higher clockrate. Nevermind that they are slower processors, they run at a higher clockrate so they are "faster". NOT
What does apple give users for the price premium you pay for thier computers?
There is NO price premium. There hasn't been one for a bout a decade. Find a PC that is equivilent and you'll discover it costs 2-3 times as much.
What you get is a faster machine, better quality hardware (ie: things actually WORK) better software, the largest selling open source OS in existance, the best UI in existance and consequently the best user experience in existance, and you get all of this for hundreds of dollars less than it would cost you to buy a closed source, 1974 era technology intel-processor based PC.
It takes a lot of evasion to continually pretend that this isn't the case... and a lot of ignorance about how computers work. Like the fact that intel processors cut the clock speed to a quarter when operating on battery power, etc. etc.
A lot of home users don't want LCDs either, but they aren't given a choice
Uh, the CRT based iMac is still for sale on Apples website. You you can run any VGA monitor your want with a PowerMac. don't want a new powermac? Can't afford it cause you're so po? Go buy a used Mac.
You have the choice. Whatever you really want, you can get from Apple. They do make machines focused on what most people want. but if you want an 800MHz G4 with a CRT monitor, go buy a used PowerMac.
Or just keep making up excuses to avoid switching to the best hardware provider out there.
An 800MHz PowerPC processor runs at 800 MHz. IT does more calculations becuase of wider datapaths and a modern design than an 800MHz Intel chip. It is FASTER.
Secondly, on a laptop there is no such thing as a 1GHz Intel chip. Why? Because when you're not plugged in, that chip runs at 250MHz or slower.
Intel chips cannot run low power at 1GHz, they are too big, and to complicated and draw too much power.
So, you're actually whining that Apple doen't have a 200MHz processor in their laptop, which you'd prefer over the 800MHz processor they do have?
THIS MAKES NO SENSE.
... according to you people. Is 800MHz worth that much more than 667? You ask?
Well, as if that's the only difference. PC people are so fixated on MHz, they ignore everything else-- I swear these people would buy a car with no wheels because the engine was 8 cylinder rather than 4.
The LCD is a bigger one, with a higher resolution. the cache is the largest availible on a laptop anywhere. It now comes with gigabit ethernet and more video out options, etc. etc. etc.
I bet most PC laptop people don't realize that A PowerPC runs at 800MHz even on battery while a Pentium runs at 200MHz on battery.
The "macs are more expensive" myth has been around for ages.
But since 1990, if you compare a mac to a PC similarly equipped, you find tht the mac is cheaper and faster. Or, if you find a PC that is as fast, you find that the mac is about HALF the cost!
The powperPC advantage lets you buy a high end computer for low end prices.
Macs are ALWAYS a better deal.
"Small user base"? Small is a relative. The largest installed base, and the fastest growing by far- of open source operating systems is Darwin.
I find it funny that slashdots hate microsoft so much but they hate apple even more. So, everyone should kow-tow to microsoft and complain about it?
Or are you going to support a real alternative and stop buying Wintel PCs?
Talk about hypocracy!