Haha, of course you don't get it, because you don't see the third option:)
1) Justifying purchase is true; that's always true, even a little bit, even subconsciously 2) Apple has a good image, no doubt about it, good PR 3) Self image pride; people associate themselves with their brands. People trust Apple (just like people 'trust' Ford, or 'trust' Chevy, or 'trust' Honda, 'trust' Toyota, etc). They find the products meet/exceed expectations, so you literally set yourself up for attack by attacking their self image.
I don't understand why you don't get it. Everyone holds things dear to themselves, and then they react vociferously when those things are attacked; they become defensive, aggressive, and vocal. So taking that abstract concept and making it concrete, what it means is you baited them by denying their values, and they proceed to defend those values, in *self* defense.
5gb when it first came out, and the 10gb when the trackpad revision came out.
I bought it because it made my life better. Instead of $1,600 worth of CDs I barely listened to, I now have a soundtrack to my life. That's all. It works. It was a better solution, two years ago, than any other device on the market, and today it's still highly competitive.
You're involved in a semantic game: What is innovation? What is marketing?
I think that distracts you from the point other people are trying to make: The iPod is a fabulous design, exceeds people's expectations, and is worth crowing about because even now there is little in the way of comparison.
You sound bitter and jealous; you don't use a Mac, you don't own an iPod, you don't use OS X, you don't use iTunes, you don't buy music from the music store...
Does it bother you that Apple customers are generally happy with what they buy and purchase? Does that strike you as wrong?
I am very happy with my purchases, and I've sold three people onto the Mac, not because I lie and spin, but because I enjoy the experience so much. And then they do, too!
If that's the personal price for collective freedom, then so be it. Nothing libre is free, and nothing free is libre:)
IE, you can't fight any battle without being willing to suffer the consequences; if you can't stand an IRS audit and being questioned by the FBI to the point that you would give up your political and social freedoms, then that is exactly what will happen; you will be spared inconvenience in exchange for the loss of freedoms.
So we suffer through the idiocy of the RIAA because we know we also have the power to destroy the RIAA, economically. We suffer through the Patriot Act because we also know we have the political power to scrap it; it is all a complex game of negotiation and communication, and the minute one side concedes or decides not to play, then the other side wins.
How does that qualify you to judge so harshly then?
Apple has innovated and Apple has refined. Apple has steered the market.
Apple released the iPod, and the iTunes Music Store. What is the value in that? How about the fact that Dell, in comparison, now sees that as something worth emulating with their newly announced music device? Or that MusicMatch just announced their own music download service with terms amazingly similar to the iTMS. Sure Apple wasn't *first*. Apple doesn't have to be first in *everything* to be a guiding market force.
Things Apple *is* first on, though, since Jobs came back: Desktop video, literally. A DV camcorder, a Mac, and iMovie. Desktop DVD. The above, plus a DVD-R. There were no affordable, easy, or reliable solutions to either, beforehand. The closest was Adobe Premiere, to iMovie, and that *sucked*. Now there are lots of workalikes and competitive software, but not 5 years ago!
Things Apple aren't fist, but still important: Easy to use music device, the iPod. At the time the alternatives were huge and heavy (Creative Nomad) or hard to use (Nomad or Archos) or low quality and capacity (Rio). Now we have better Nomads, better Archos, better Rio Karmas, etc. Competition makes a better market for everyone! Easy to use music service, iTMS. At the time there was eMusic, which offered little in the way of mainstream, and Rhapsody and Pressplay, which weren't very consumer friendly. Now that Apple has shown that music can be *profitable*, we have MusicMatch, PureTunes, and a bunch of other services revamping their business models because of Apple. Again, competition!
Everything else is just about fit and finish and making the customer 'happy'. iBooks, PowerBooks, PowerMacs, none of it is revolutionary, all of it is evolutionary... but Mac owners seem to be happier; less remote exploits, less viruses, prettier interface, prettier hardware, easier to use, cleaner interface, simpler to learn, 'just works mantra'... Things that make people like computing, and make them want to buy more of it. This naturally extends to the iPod and iTMS, and why those two have succeeded when competitors aren't so... prosperous.
So you can feel free not to think Apple is doing anything special... but I expect a change in the music industry, music downloads, and music distribution thanks to Apple. Very soon I think we'll see the same with video, again to Apple, and a huge influx of indie movie folk, again because of Apple.
Microsoft abuses it's power in order to attempt to invade new markets.
Microsoft believes strongly in vendor lock; good for them, not for the customer.
Microsoft encourages a monoculture as well as a monopoly, and in doing so weakens and damages all of us.
If you want an alternative to Adobe, even if slightly crappier, there is Macromedia, Quark, and Corel. Microsoft is the *last* company I would willingly invest with my cash and give any more power than they can force out of me.
Hehe, and I love the hierarchical browsing in OS X; gives you a sense of path, location, and depth all in one compact space.
I wonder what the impetus for BeOS is; I perfectly understand the *hobbiest* drive, it's what keeps interest in Amiga alive... but is there a business demand for BeOS?
That it doesn't only affect US gov IT. It affects US military IT, US medical IT, US business IT, US service IT...
Nearly every sector of the US economy suffers from the Microsoft monoculture, and is therefore vulnerable to the same problems every other sector has...
Once one gets it, all will get it. That's kind of the inherent danger of monoculture.
Even with perfect administration the danger of monoculture exists.
A single MS RPC exploit would make all machines vulnerable until patched.
A single WMA buffer overflow makes all machines vulnerable until patched.
No matter how perfect, the problem isn't the administrators, but the monoculture. If one in 3 machines was Mac, and one in 4 were Linux, you'd have enough diversity that a virus would slow down drastically enough to be contained.
So they reimage about 5gb worth of OS + Applications per machine, and assuming it's a decently fast FW drive at 20mb/s means about 5 minutes per machine.
So an iPod with 30 eMacs in a lab should take about the same, since an iPod clocks in at 16mb/s (I own one) but there shouldn't be nearly as many applications/software on an eMac as on a G5... so 150 minutes, or a little over two hours a night.
And at standard lab-rate of $5/hr, that's $10 to reimage the entire lab.
That's the whole point of the PPC970's Altivec unit, isn't it?
Here, scroll down a little to see the CPU performance on RC5, and note how a dual GHz G4 is 2x as powerful as a dual 1.533GHz Athlon.
Extrapolate then to a dual 2.0GHz G5 vs a, I dunno, dual 2.0GHz Opteron... why wouldn't it be, if not 2x faster, at least as fast, if we want to be generous and assume that AMD somehow managed to figure out how to increase the performance of the Opteron over the Athlon by more than 2 (in order to take into account the fact that the G4->G5 increase is 1.0GHz, but the Athlon->Opteron increase is only 500MHz...)
With an Open Source program, you don't NEED to get to talk to the original programmer for any reason at all. All you need to do is hire your own programmer to go through the code, and understand it. Then when a question arises, you can simply refer to your local expert, or look through the code yourself to locate the problem.
Hrm, this same logic should apply to medicine, cars, houses, and just about anything else that we as people have access to Original Source... yet notice how as a society and culture we tend to specialize and rely on experts?
I would be that, due to economics and division of labor, it is more productive and cost effective for VT, and many other places, to rely on a third party (IE Apple or Red Hat) to support their OS, while they themselves support, say, their business/product/venture... in this case, VT's research, while Apple supports the hardware/software. Makes sense, doesn't it? Each party does what it does best, so that the end result is more spectacular than if VT decided to, I dunno, devote resources to replicate what Apple already knows. Or at least has the resources to know.
Except VT isn't going to be running SPEC[int|fp]+[_rate]*2000, so optimizing against those benchmarks isn't sufficient.
When all is said and done, it's been shown that for many vectorizable programs, Altivec still spanks SSE/SSE2/3d!Now, and anything else offered in the commodity market. Couple dual 2GHz G5s with Altivec and IBM's XLC autovectorizing compiler, and I think VT probably does have quite a powerful machine, more so than SPEC scores can quantify.
Re: Processors Perhaps for their benchmarks, the G5 was 2x the performance of the Opteron. Have you taken into consideration the Altivec processor, which happens to be 128bit in size? Any vector processing will be enhanced greatly by the powerful nature of the G5 in general, and especially when using Altivec optimized code. Couple this with IBM's XLC auto-vectorizing C compiler, and I wouldn't be surprised if Altivec did wipe SSE2/3D!Now; it's been discussed before that Altivec is a superior solution to MMX/MMX2/SSE, and SSE2, so there's no reason to doubt that when you pump up the FSB from 167MHz->1GHz, pump up the CPU from 1.4GHz->2.0GHz, on the PowerPC architecture, that Altivec doesn't become the most powerful SIMD solution in commodity computing.
Re: Chassis It may be a time of research vs time to market discrepancy; IE, at the time VT was requesting bids, there were no Opteron chassis announced or available, whilst Apple may have had at 95% completion, barring an actual press release and announcement. Like, simultaneous to the release of the G5 there are no IBM PPC 970 machines, yet both companies use the same CPU.
Re: OS X Yeah, there is a 64 bit X. It's called OS X Panther, and there's a 64 bit aware X called 10.2.7, and the libraries for Altivec have been 128bit for years now, so all 10.2.7 really added was... 64 bit pointers and memory addresses, really.
To recap: Altivec makes a big difference. Having immediately available machines makes a difference. Having a lower price point per performance per machine makes a difference (each node, including AC + networking + ram only costs about $4,727, which is $1,600 lower than an identically specced stock dual G5 with 4GB of ram!), as well as supportability of OS X vs Linux or, heaven forbid, Windows 2k... And yes, OS X for these machines are at least 64 bit enough to address 8GB of ram, and the OS has *always* been able to manipulate 128 bit data, as well as 64 bit data.
I haven't actually tried it yet since I don't have access to enough Macs, but I imagine it's something you would start and let happen overnight... I mean, that's more or less how Apple does it in their own stores, wipe and restore overnight, I think. Or at least after the store closes and before the next opening day.
Haha, you're right, this is exactly like micelles.
Not disagreeing with you, but trying to explain to those who don't know why it might be more important than not. If nothing else, we have discovered another self organizing principle; gather enough of them together, and there may be the possibility of life.
I think a lot of people are missing some of the implications too.
Before true life can occur, there needs, I think, to be a process, a method, a life cycle, where something like a plasma ball, a soap bubble, or a fatty lipid ball, can be produced and propagated. You need to be able to, in the absence of real life, create an environment that encourages, protects, and shields the life-activity from what happens outside the life activity.
So plasma balls that can cleanly separate inside reactions from outside reactions is important, all the more so if they are self assembling from nothing; given enough time and random variables it's likely that one or two of them will form with something *interesting* trapped inside, something that will further enhance the operation of the plasma ball, and over time that may "evolve" into something a lot like life.
But first you need the plasma balls to trap the "interesting" bits first.
The idea is that you need some kind of self replicating self forming cell structure before you can have DNA; something to protect whatever gets trapped and absorbed inside.
Without plasma cells, you can't contemplate plasma life because the cell protects, shields, and encourages whatever happens inside from whatever is happening outside.
If I'm reading the article right, it means that the extension effect has no memory: If a caloric restriction can extend your life by 40 years, then you can choose to apply that at 40, (when you need to lose weight *anyway*) rather than when you're 20, and energetic.
So that, the end result seems to be no matter when you start the diet, you will still only live to 140, but you don't have to do it your whole life to see the benefits; the other effect of starting late is that you can still enjoy quite a bit of life... and then when you feel like dying again, you just start eating cheeseburgers again.
One other point of the story is that if there's no memory effect, then it's possible you can recreate the effects with a drug or treatment, because it doesn't require weeks/months/years of application, but only a single use, and then constant repeated application, for the effect to kick in.
IE, birth control pills have no memory effect, you can use them any time to retard pregnancy and stop any time to get fertile again.
You're also looking at a 5 year old case... they've been modified several times since then (evolved, enhanced, improved, whatever) and for the last three designs go something like this:
Unlatch door (pull up and pull out) Unscrew one retaining screw Slide drive out and up
And as for re-imaging... why are they removing the drives?
Macs support boot across the net, boot across Firewire, and boot across scsi...
Meaning you boot off another image, clone/reimage the drive, then reboot off the internal drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, of course you don't get it, because you don't see the third option :)
1) Justifying purchase is true; that's always true, even a little bit, even subconsciously
2) Apple has a good image, no doubt about it, good PR
3) Self image pride; people associate themselves with their brands. People trust Apple (just like people 'trust' Ford, or 'trust' Chevy, or 'trust' Honda, 'trust' Toyota, etc). They find the products meet/exceed expectations, so you literally set yourself up for attack by attacking their self image.
I don't understand why you don't get it. Everyone holds things dear to themselves, and then they react vociferously when those things are attacked; they become defensive, aggressive, and vocal. So taking that abstract concept and making it concrete, what it means is you baited them by denying their values, and they proceed to defend those values, in *self* defense.
You seem incredibly narrow minded yourself.
I bought it! Twice!
5gb when it first came out, and the 10gb when the trackpad revision came out.
I bought it because it made my life better. Instead of $1,600 worth of CDs I barely listened to, I now have a soundtrack to my life. That's all. It works. It was a better solution, two years ago, than any other device on the market, and today it's still highly competitive.
You're involved in a semantic game: What is innovation? What is marketing?
I think that distracts you from the point other people are trying to make: The iPod is a fabulous design, exceeds people's expectations, and is worth crowing about because even now there is little in the way of comparison.
You sound bitter and jealous; you don't use a Mac, you don't own an iPod, you don't use OS X, you don't use iTunes, you don't buy music from the music store...
Does it bother you that Apple customers are generally happy with what they buy and purchase? Does that strike you as wrong?
I am very happy with my purchases, and I've sold three people onto the Mac, not because I lie and spin, but because I enjoy the experience so much. And then they do, too!
Hmm, what makes you think they've conceded or stopped playing?
If that's the personal price for collective freedom, then so be it. Nothing libre is free, and nothing free is libre :)
IE, you can't fight any battle without being willing to suffer the consequences; if you can't stand an IRS audit and being questioned by the FBI to the point that you would give up your political and social freedoms, then that is exactly what will happen; you will be spared inconvenience in exchange for the loss of freedoms.
So we suffer through the idiocy of the RIAA because we know we also have the power to destroy the RIAA, economically. We suffer through the Patriot Act because we also know we have the political power to scrap it; it is all a complex game of negotiation and communication, and the minute one side concedes or decides not to play, then the other side wins.
And, "I don't really care much for OS X."
How does that qualify you to judge so harshly then?
Apple has innovated and Apple has refined. Apple has steered the market.
Apple released the iPod, and the iTunes Music Store. What is the value in that? How about the fact that Dell, in comparison, now sees that as something worth emulating with their newly announced music device? Or that MusicMatch just announced their own music download service with terms amazingly similar to the iTMS. Sure Apple wasn't *first*. Apple doesn't have to be first in *everything* to be a guiding market force.
Things Apple *is* first on, though, since Jobs came back:
Desktop video, literally. A DV camcorder, a Mac, and iMovie.
Desktop DVD. The above, plus a DVD-R. There were no affordable, easy, or reliable solutions to either, beforehand. The closest was Adobe Premiere, to iMovie, and that *sucked*. Now there are lots of workalikes and competitive software, but not 5 years ago!
Things Apple aren't fist, but still important:
Easy to use music device, the iPod. At the time the alternatives were huge and heavy (Creative Nomad) or hard to use (Nomad or Archos) or low quality and capacity (Rio). Now we have better Nomads, better Archos, better Rio Karmas, etc. Competition makes a better market for everyone!
Easy to use music service, iTMS. At the time there was eMusic, which offered little in the way of mainstream, and Rhapsody and Pressplay, which weren't very consumer friendly. Now that Apple has shown that music can be *profitable*, we have MusicMatch, PureTunes, and a bunch of other services revamping their business models because of Apple. Again, competition!
Everything else is just about fit and finish and making the customer 'happy'. iBooks, PowerBooks, PowerMacs, none of it is revolutionary, all of it is evolutionary... but Mac owners seem to be happier; less remote exploits, less viruses, prettier interface, prettier hardware, easier to use, cleaner interface, simpler to learn, 'just works mantra'... Things that make people like computing, and make them want to buy more of it. This naturally extends to the iPod and iTMS, and why those two have succeeded when competitors aren't so... prosperous.
So you can feel free not to think Apple is doing anything special... but I expect a change in the music industry, music downloads, and music distribution thanks to Apple. Very soon I think we'll see the same with video, again to Apple, and a huge influx of indie movie folk, again because of Apple.
Don't be painting *Microsoft* as clean either!
Microsoft abuses it's power in order to attempt to invade new markets.
Microsoft believes strongly in vendor lock; good for them, not for the customer.
Microsoft encourages a monoculture as well as a monopoly, and in doing so weakens and damages all of us.
If you want an alternative to Adobe, even if slightly crappier, there is Macromedia, Quark, and Corel. Microsoft is the *last* company I would willingly invest with my cash and give any more power than they can force out of me.
Hehe, and I love the hierarchical browsing in OS X; gives you a sense of path, location, and depth all in one compact space.
I wonder what the impetus for BeOS is; I perfectly understand the *hobbiest* drive, it's what keeps interest in Amiga alive... but is there a business demand for BeOS?
That it doesn't only affect US gov IT. It affects US military IT, US medical IT, US business IT, US service IT...
Nearly every sector of the US economy suffers from the Microsoft monoculture, and is therefore vulnerable to the same problems every other sector has...
Once one gets it, all will get it. That's kind of the inherent danger of monoculture.
Even with perfect administration the danger of monoculture exists.
A single MS RPC exploit would make all machines vulnerable until patched.
A single WMA buffer overflow makes all machines vulnerable until patched.
No matter how perfect, the problem isn't the administrators, but the monoculture. If one in 3 machines was Mac, and one in 4 were Linux, you'd have enough diversity that a virus would slow down drastically enough to be contained.
So they reimage about 5gb worth of OS + Applications per machine, and assuming it's a decently fast FW drive at 20mb/s means about 5 minutes per machine.
So an iPod with 30 eMacs in a lab should take about the same, since an iPod clocks in at 16mb/s (I own one) but there shouldn't be nearly as many applications/software on an eMac as on a G5... so 150 minutes, or a little over two hours a night.
And at standard lab-rate of $5/hr, that's $10 to reimage the entire lab.
That's the whole point of the PPC970's Altivec unit, isn't it?
Here, scroll down a little to see the CPU performance on RC5, and note how a dual GHz G4 is 2x as powerful as a dual 1.533GHz Athlon.
Extrapolate then to a dual 2.0GHz G5 vs a, I dunno, dual 2.0GHz Opteron... why wouldn't it be, if not 2x faster, at least as fast, if we want to be generous and assume that AMD somehow managed to figure out how to increase the performance of the Opteron over the Athlon by more than 2 (in order to take into account the fact that the G4->G5 increase is 1.0GHz, but the Athlon->Opteron increase is only 500MHz...)
Hrm, this same logic should apply to medicine, cars, houses, and just about anything else that we as people have access to Original Source... yet notice how as a society and culture we tend to specialize and rely on experts?
I would be that, due to economics and division of labor, it is more productive and cost effective for VT, and many other places, to rely on a third party (IE Apple or Red Hat) to support their OS, while they themselves support, say, their business/product/venture... in this case, VT's research, while Apple supports the hardware/software. Makes sense, doesn't it? Each party does what it does best, so that the end result is more spectacular than if VT decided to, I dunno, devote resources to replicate what Apple already knows. Or at least has the resources to know.
Except VT isn't going to be running SPEC[int|fp]+[_rate]*2000, so optimizing against those benchmarks isn't sufficient.
When all is said and done, it's been shown that for many vectorizable programs, Altivec still spanks SSE/SSE2/3d!Now, and anything else offered in the commodity market. Couple dual 2GHz G5s with Altivec and IBM's XLC autovectorizing compiler, and I think VT probably does have quite a powerful machine, more so than SPEC scores can quantify.
Re: Processors
Perhaps for their benchmarks, the G5 was 2x the performance of the Opteron. Have you taken into consideration the Altivec processor, which happens to be 128bit in size? Any vector processing will be enhanced greatly by the powerful nature of the G5 in general, and especially when using Altivec optimized code. Couple this with IBM's XLC auto-vectorizing C compiler, and I wouldn't be surprised if Altivec did wipe SSE2/3D!Now; it's been discussed before that Altivec is a superior solution to MMX/MMX2/SSE, and SSE2, so there's no reason to doubt that when you pump up the FSB from 167MHz->1GHz, pump up the CPU from 1.4GHz->2.0GHz, on the PowerPC architecture, that Altivec doesn't become the most powerful SIMD solution in commodity computing.
Re: Chassis
It may be a time of research vs time to market discrepancy; IE, at the time VT was requesting bids, there were no Opteron chassis announced or available, whilst Apple may have had at 95% completion, barring an actual press release and announcement. Like, simultaneous to the release of the G5 there are no IBM PPC 970 machines, yet both companies use the same CPU.
Re: OS X
Yeah, there is a 64 bit X. It's called OS X Panther, and there's a 64 bit aware X called 10.2.7, and the libraries for Altivec have been 128bit for years now, so all 10.2.7 really added was... 64 bit pointers and memory addresses, really.
To recap: Altivec makes a big difference. Having immediately available machines makes a difference. Having a lower price point per performance per machine makes a difference (each node, including AC + networking + ram only costs about $4,727, which is $1,600 lower than an identically specced stock dual G5 with 4GB of ram!), as well as supportability of OS X vs Linux or, heaven forbid, Windows 2k... And yes, OS X for these machines are at least 64 bit enough to address 8GB of ram, and the OS has *always* been able to manipulate 128 bit data, as well as 64 bit data.
I haven't actually tried it yet since I don't have access to enough Macs, but I imagine it's something you would start and let happen overnight... I mean, that's more or less how Apple does it in their own stores, wipe and restore overnight, I think. Or at least after the store closes and before the next opening day.
Haha, you're right, this is exactly like micelles.
Not disagreeing with you, but trying to explain to those who don't know why it might be more important than not. If nothing else, we have discovered another self organizing principle; gather enough of them together, and there may be the possibility of life.
Here's why. Some of the more pertinent points:
Dell - too expensive [one of the reasons for the project being so "hush hush" was that dell was exploring pricing options during bidding]
Sun (sparc) - required too many processors, also too expensive
IBM/AMD (opteron) - required twice the number of processors and was twice the price in the desired configuration; had no chassis available
HP (itanium) - ditto
Apple (IBM PPC970) - system available with chassis for lowest price
I never said anything about these plasma things being alive. Why are you?
Hey, that's still not bad :)
If that's the case, I don't see why I shouldn't give it a whirl at 40+
I think a lot of people are missing some of the implications too.
Before true life can occur, there needs, I think, to be a process, a method, a life cycle, where something like a plasma ball, a soap bubble, or a fatty lipid ball, can be produced and propagated. You need to be able to, in the absence of real life, create an environment that encourages, protects, and shields the life-activity from what happens outside the life activity.
So plasma balls that can cleanly separate inside reactions from outside reactions is important, all the more so if they are self assembling from nothing; given enough time and random variables it's likely that one or two of them will form with something *interesting* trapped inside, something that will further enhance the operation of the plasma ball, and over time that may "evolve" into something a lot like life.
But first you need the plasma balls to trap the "interesting" bits first.
Soap bubbles are important too.
The idea is that you need some kind of self replicating self forming cell structure before you can have DNA; something to protect whatever gets trapped and absorbed inside.
Without plasma cells, you can't contemplate plasma life because the cell protects, shields, and encourages whatever happens inside from whatever is happening outside.
If I'm reading the article right, it means that the extension effect has no memory: If a caloric restriction can extend your life by 40 years, then you can choose to apply that at 40, (when you need to lose weight *anyway*) rather than when you're 20, and energetic.
So that, the end result seems to be no matter when you start the diet, you will still only live to 140, but you don't have to do it your whole life to see the benefits; the other effect of starting late is that you can still enjoy quite a bit of life... and then when you feel like dying again, you just start eating cheeseburgers again.
One other point of the story is that if there's no memory effect, then it's possible you can recreate the effects with a drug or treatment, because it doesn't require weeks/months/years of application, but only a single use, and then constant repeated application, for the effect to kick in.
IE, birth control pills have no memory effect, you can use them any time to retard pregnancy and stop any time to get fertile again.
You're also looking at a 5 year old case... they've been modified several times since then (evolved, enhanced, improved, whatever) and for the last three designs go something like this:
Unlatch door (pull up and pull out)
Unscrew one retaining screw
Slide drive out and up
And as for re-imaging... why are they removing the drives?
Macs support boot across the net, boot across Firewire, and boot across scsi...
Meaning you boot off another image, clone/reimage the drive, then reboot off the internal drive.
Nope, the only 'desktop' 64 bit processors come from IBM and AMD;
AMD Opteron
AMD Athlon64
IBM PPC970
Intel's 64 bit solutions is the Itanium! Anything with the Pentium moniker is 32 bit. The Itanium is the one which suffers 32 bit emulation lag.
So if you want 64 bit, you're stuck with, realistically, a Mac or some brand of Athlon CPU.
Get a free copy of OS X Panther, iChat A/V, and an iSight for your settlement ^^