You would think that geeks who place emphasis on technical specifications wouldn't so blithely ignore them when it comes to Apple.
Er, usually the problem is focussing *too much* on the technical specifications. For example, if you ignore the tiny case of the Mac Mini, you can buy a PC equivalent for about 1/2 - 2/3 the price. For another, if your main interest is "processing power", then an $800 Dell Studio XPS matches up to a $2500 Mac Pro.
The old dual-socket Mac Pros were actually very good value, but that is _highly_ anomalous in the Mac world, if all you're looking at is "technical specifications".
First of all where is your source that MacPro is equivalent to a T3500?
The T3500 is replacing the T3400, which is the single-socket Precision Workstation. Ie: the equivalent of the bottom-end, single-socket, quad-core Mac Pro.
All the news sources I have only generally list the processor and no detailed specifications.
You don't need them. Simple knowledge of the Precision and Mac Pro lineups will tell you everything. The T5400 is the outgoing dual-socket model that is (/was) the equivalent of the dual-socket Mac Pro. It will be replaced by the T5500 (which will remain the equivalent of the dual-socket Mac Pro). The T3500 replaces the T3400, and slots in at a lower spec level Apple has not had an equvalent for since the single-socket G5 some years ago (but now does with the bottom-end Mac Pro).
The T7500 sits at a higher segment in the market than Apple caters to. It will come with extremely high-end video options, 15k SAS (and probably SSD) drives, massive RAM capacity (the 192G references in the summary), usually 4-6 high speed expansion slots, etc, etc.
How come when Dell releases a workstation, people don't do the same.
Because Dell doesn't have a honkin' great big hole in their hardware lineup (a mid-range tower) that so many people want to see filled.
Incidentally, people often try to compare "Newegg specials" with Precision-level hardware. You probably just don't see it as much because new Mac hardware pretty much guarantees a Slashdot front-pagers, whereas new Dell hardware only bears mention maybe once every 3 generations.
That's because Apple's Mac Pro equivalent to the T7500 starts at $3300 and maxes out at a paltry 32G of RAM, while Dell's equivalent to the $2500 Mac Pro (the T3500) will start at $1000 (and max out at 24G of RAM rather than 8G).
No outrage about how you can build a desktop on newegg for cheaper than Dell.
Dell sell a Core i7-based Studio XPS for $800. You *would* be hard pressed to build that for less on Newegg.
I have yet to see any system that allows me to do that sort of multitasking like I could do with OS/2.
I'm going to take a guess that you are talking about RSJ.
The behaviour you describe has nothing to do with the OS's "multitasking" abilities, it's entirely dependent on whether you have a suitable packet-writing driver installed. There's no reason you _couldn't_ do that on NT (or even Windows 9x), if someone bothered to write a driver.
Back in 1996, of course (pretty sure ATAPI drives hadn't even been invented then), but they've all been ATAPI since then (so since about 1999 maybe ?).
I have never, ever had a problem multitasking in Windows NT while burning CDs (although obviously IO-intensive tasks could cause a coaster before all those "Burn-proof" technologies appeared). Heck, even with a USB burner I just kick it off in the background and get on with my work.
Well, Windows 95 did have preemptive multitasking, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "full". At the time many users were still using 16-bit apps or had hardware that wasn't fully supported. Windows 95 was also poorly implemented overall, so it's not like it really multitasked "as well".
Considering everything it was supposed to do, and how much of it it managed to do, I would have to say that it was extremely well implemented.
Until last year I actually thought that was a limitation of the hardware, [...]
Well it's certainly not a Windows problem. I've been happily burning CDs while doing everything else from browsing the web to playing games, on a Windows NT machine, since 1996.
Re:There is a slight Mac head skew here...
on
10 OSes We Left Behind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Plus, Windows95 was still a DOS shell.
Windows 95 was a LOT more than "a DOS shell". It handled hardware drivers, memory management, CPU scheduling, user interaction, provided APIs, etc, etc. In fact, it did everything any textbook would consider to define an OS.
Re:OS/2 STILL multitasks better than Windoze
on
10 OSes We Left Behind
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I remember on a Pentium 90 being able to actually WORK in an imaging application, while I was simultaneously both printing a document and copying a floppy disk.
My NT4 machine handled this fine. Heck, I used to burn CDs (at a blazing 4x on my brand new CD burner) and play Quakeworld at the same time on that baby.
NT was built to replace OS/2, and it showed. OS/2 was single user, had no SMP support and didn't even have a dynamic disk cache. That's before even getting into the 16 bit HPFS layer and the infamous Single Input Queue.
Agreed, but I'm still scratching my head after all these years wondering why so much emphasis is still being placed on the taskbar when virtual desktops offer a better solution.
Because they're not. At best, they're a different solution, only with a significantly poorer level of discoverability.
I found the concept of the 'file | edit | view | window' (etc) menu up the top, being in a consistent location to be nothing short of genius, it actually allowed me (a maximised only, always!) windows person to be able to use applications in a windows without feeling hampered.
Try it on a 30" screen, or with multiple monitors, and you might not find it quite so cool.
I don't know how they do it. Seriously. I end up spending way too much time moving windows around if I don't have virtual desktops. If I'm trying to multitask it's much, much worse.
Where can I go into a shop and buy a PC with the previous incarnation of Windows? And if Vista is such a success why is MS moving to Windows 7 already?
"Already" ? Vista will be 3 years old by the time Windows 7 is released (and that's assuming it's released on schedule).
So many humans choose to be vegans, and yet veganism is not part of human nature? Great logic there, Sherlock.
It's borderline impossible to follow a proper vegan diet in the absence of modern technology (dietary supplements, out of season foods, non-local foods, etc).
The one concession you make going with the Dell XPS Studio with the i7 processor is that the on-board RAM is limited to 12 Gig, some of the third-party boards can go to 24 Gigs, but that RAM is quite expensive.
Dell will only sell you 12G of RAM, but there's no reason you can't put 24G into it - it has 6 DIMM slots.
You can get a pretty beefy Dell PowerEdge server with a quad core processor for less than $800.
It won't be as fast as the Core i7 in the XPS studio, however, especially for virtualisation. It's also not going to have the same RAM capacity (4 slots vs 6).
(This equation may change in the next week or so when the i7-based Xeons are "officially" released.)
Having the OS and it's compilers change single threaded code into something that can take advantage of multiple cores *for you* is what Apple is working on.
Right. And each copy of Snow Leopard is going to come with a free unicorn.
Is there a relatively cheap shared disk setup I could buy or put together? I'd like to have something big and strong enough to do at least a 3 node Oracle RAC for an example, running ASM, and OCFS."
Er, if you're running VMs, you inherently have "cheap shared disk" - the disk in the host that any of the VMs can access.:)
Dell currently have the Studio XPS (2.66Ghz Core i7, 3G RAM, 500G HDD) going for US$800 - for a basic home virtualisation server, it's hard to go past, especially if you spend another US$80 or so to bump the RAM up to 9GB. I can't imagine you could build it yourself for a whole lot less (depending on how you value your time, of course).
(Damn, sometimes I wish I lived in the US. Stuff is just so bloody cheap there.)
With the LLVM Compiler and GrandCentral [appleinsider.com], Apple has been working for years now on a way to better take advantage of machines with many cores. Once again, they are making a leap that Microsoft will not be able to match for many years.
Say what ? Microsoft built an OS from the ground up for SMP systems more than 15 years ago. It's called Windows NT.
Apple is the *last* vendor to be getting into the SMP groove. Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and pretty much everyone else would like to welcome them to the party, but the party finished a few days ago. Heck, the biggest machine OS X runs on at all only has 8 processors - you could get off the shelf hardware to do the same with Windows and Linux nearly a decade ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree that it was anything more than a pile of shit.
Considering the constraints, it was a fairly amazing achievement.
While it was finally what Microsoft promised in 1985, it didn't really cut the mustard by 1995.
Microsoft promised a 32-bit, memory protected, pre-emptive multitasking, GUI OS in 1985 ? What were they going to run it on ?
It was still a DOS shell at it's heart.
It was not. A "DOS shell" doesn't provide memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, hardware drivers or a complex compatibility layer.
XP was what was promised in 1995.
Please explain why XP would qualify as "what was promised in 1995, but Windows NT 3.1 would not.
You would think that geeks who place emphasis on technical specifications wouldn't so blithely ignore them when it comes to Apple.
Er, usually the problem is focussing *too much* on the technical specifications. For example, if you ignore the tiny case of the Mac Mini, you can buy a PC equivalent for about 1/2 - 2/3 the price. For another, if your main interest is "processing power", then an $800 Dell Studio XPS matches up to a $2500 Mac Pro.
The old dual-socket Mac Pros were actually very good value, but that is _highly_ anomalous in the Mac world, if all you're looking at is "technical specifications".
Shall we apply all of the horrors that Atheists have committed to all Atheists as well?
How many of them were done in the name of Atheism ?
First of all where is your source that MacPro is equivalent to a T3500?
The T3500 is replacing the T3400, which is the single-socket Precision Workstation. Ie: the equivalent of the bottom-end, single-socket, quad-core Mac Pro.
All the news sources I have only generally list the processor and no detailed specifications.
You don't need them. Simple knowledge of the Precision and Mac Pro lineups will tell you everything. The T5400 is the outgoing dual-socket model that is (/was) the equivalent of the dual-socket Mac Pro. It will be replaced by the T5500 (which will remain the equivalent of the dual-socket Mac Pro). The T3500 replaces the T3400, and slots in at a lower spec level Apple has not had an equvalent for since the single-socket G5 some years ago (but now does with the bottom-end Mac Pro).
The T7500 sits at a higher segment in the market than Apple caters to. It will come with extremely high-end video options, 15k SAS (and probably SSD) drives, massive RAM capacity (the 192G references in the summary), usually 4-6 high speed expansion slots, etc, etc.
How come when Dell releases a workstation, people don't do the same.
Because Dell doesn't have a honkin' great big hole in their hardware lineup (a mid-range tower) that so many people want to see filled.
Incidentally, people often try to compare "Newegg specials" with Precision-level hardware. You probably just don't see it as much because new Mac hardware pretty much guarantees a Slashdot front-pagers, whereas new Dell hardware only bears mention maybe once every 3 generations.
There's outrage.
That's because Apple's Mac Pro equivalent to the T7500 starts at $3300 and maxes out at a paltry 32G of RAM, while Dell's equivalent to the $2500 Mac Pro (the T3500) will start at $1000 (and max out at 24G of RAM rather than 8G).
No outrage about how you can build a desktop on newegg for cheaper than Dell.
Dell sell a Core i7-based Studio XPS for $800. You *would* be hard pressed to build that for less on Newegg.
It was still MS-DOS 7.0.
No, it was not, as was trivially demonstrate by actually booting to DOS 7.0.
I have yet to see any system that allows me to do that sort of multitasking like I could do with OS/2.
I'm going to take a guess that you are talking about RSJ.
The behaviour you describe has nothing to do with the OS's "multitasking" abilities, it's entirely dependent on whether you have a suitable packet-writing driver installed. There's no reason you _couldn't_ do that on NT (or even Windows 9x), if someone bothered to write a driver.
Interesting. SCSI CD by any chance?
Back in 1996, of course (pretty sure ATAPI drives hadn't even been invented then), but they've all been ATAPI since then (so since about 1999 maybe ?).
I have never, ever had a problem multitasking in Windows NT while burning CDs (although obviously IO-intensive tasks could cause a coaster before all those "Burn-proof" technologies appeared). Heck, even with a USB burner I just kick it off in the background and get on with my work.
Well, Windows 95 did have preemptive multitasking, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "full". At the time many users were still using 16-bit apps or had hardware that wasn't fully supported. Windows 95 was also poorly implemented overall, so it's not like it really multitasked "as well".
Considering everything it was supposed to do, and how much of it it managed to do, I would have to say that it was extremely well implemented.
Until last year I actually thought that was a limitation of the hardware, [...]
Well it's certainly not a Windows problem. I've been happily burning CDs while doing everything else from browsing the web to playing games, on a Windows NT machine, since 1996.
Plus, Windows95 was still a DOS shell.
Windows 95 was a LOT more than "a DOS shell". It handled hardware drivers, memory management, CPU scheduling, user interaction, provided APIs, etc, etc. In fact, it did everything any textbook would consider to define an OS.
I remember on a Pentium 90 being able to actually WORK in an imaging application, while I was simultaneously both printing a document and copying a floppy disk.
My NT4 machine handled this fine. Heck, I used to burn CDs (at a blazing 4x on my brand new CD burner) and play Quakeworld at the same time on that baby.
NT was built to replace OS/2, and it showed. OS/2 was single user, had no SMP support and didn't even have a dynamic disk cache. That's before even getting into the 16 bit HPFS layer and the infamous Single Input Queue.
Agreed, but I'm still scratching my head after all these years wondering why so much emphasis is still being placed on the taskbar when virtual desktops offer a better solution.
Because they're not. At best, they're a different solution, only with a significantly poorer level of discoverability.
I found the concept of the 'file | edit | view | window' (etc) menu up the top, being in a consistent location to be nothing short of genius, it actually allowed me (a maximised only, always!) windows person to be able to use applications in a windows without feeling hampered.
Try it on a 30" screen, or with multiple monitors, and you might not find it quite so cool.
I don't know how they do it. Seriously. I end up spending way too much time moving windows around if I don't have virtual desktops. If I'm trying to multitask it's much, much worse.
It's called the Taskbar.
Where can I go into a shop and buy a PC with the previous incarnation of Windows? And if Vista is such a success why is MS moving to Windows 7 already?
"Already" ? Vista will be 3 years old by the time Windows 7 is released (and that's assuming it's released on schedule).
So many humans choose to be vegans, and yet veganism is not part of human nature? Great logic there, Sherlock.
It's borderline impossible to follow a proper vegan diet in the absence of modern technology (dietary supplements, out of season foods, non-local foods, etc).
The one concession you make going with the Dell XPS Studio with the i7 processor is that the on-board RAM is limited to 12 Gig, some of the third-party boards can go to 24 Gigs, but that RAM is quite expensive.
Dell will only sell you 12G of RAM, but there's no reason you can't put 24G into it - it has 6 DIMM slots.
You can get a pretty beefy Dell PowerEdge server with a quad core processor for less than $800.
It won't be as fast as the Core i7 in the XPS studio, however, especially for virtualisation. It's also not going to have the same RAM capacity (4 slots vs 6).
(This equation may change in the next week or so when the i7-based Xeons are "officially" released.)
Having the OS and it's compilers change single threaded code into something that can take advantage of multiple cores *for you* is what Apple is working on.
Right. And each copy of Snow Leopard is going to come with a free unicorn.
Is there a relatively cheap shared disk setup I could buy or put together? I'd like to have something big and strong enough to do at least a 3 node Oracle RAC for an example, running ASM, and OCFS."
Er, if you're running VMs, you inherently have "cheap shared disk" - the disk in the host that any of the VMs can access. :)
Dell currently have the Studio XPS (2.66Ghz Core i7, 3G RAM, 500G HDD) going for US$800 - for a basic home virtualisation server, it's hard to go past, especially if you spend another US$80 or so to bump the RAM up to 9GB. I can't imagine you could build it yourself for a whole lot less (depending on how you value your time, of course).
(Damn, sometimes I wish I lived in the US. Stuff is just so bloody cheap there.)
The initial SMP support was added to Linux 1.3.42 on 15 Nov 1995.
Windows NT supported SMP from its first release in 1993.
With the LLVM Compiler and GrandCentral [appleinsider.com], Apple has been working for years now on a way to better take advantage of machines with many cores. Once again, they are making a leap that Microsoft will not be able to match for many years.
Say what ? Microsoft built an OS from the ground up for SMP systems more than 15 years ago. It's called Windows NT.
Apple is the *last* vendor to be getting into the SMP groove. Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and pretty much everyone else would like to welcome them to the party, but the party finished a few days ago. Heck, the biggest machine OS X runs on at all only has 8 processors - you could get off the shelf hardware to do the same with Windows and Linux nearly a decade ago.
The thing about libertarians is that Ron Paul sucks.
From reading Slashdot, I have deduced that Libertarians are like Republicans, only without the empathy and concern for their fellow man.