Frankly, no matter how good Linux is, it isn't a consumer operating system yet. I am sometimes baffled by the things mentioned when it gets down to kernals and roots and compiling (oh my!), so an average consumer would just be out of their league.
A real techie (many of which use Linux) would not buy one o these things. They would want the 700 MHz Athlon with 256MB ram and a 20gig hard drive, a GeForce 256, blah, blah, blah.
What techie wants a computer that looks like pastel dung(TM), a puny hard drive, and a general lack of features. The thing is cheap, and I don't mean cost-effective.
Most people don't understand Linux and the ones that do would not want this piece of crap.
Apple when it started it's iMac series was known for being a big player in the education market, and thus a natural move was to actually introduce one that they could afford. But Linux? Cmon now.
CD-ROM optional..... so when you go to buy software is has to be on floppy? Or do they expect that every single person that buys these is going to set it up or the internet and download all their software?
Most consumers don't understand how to do that. All they could figure out to do with this pastel dung(TM) is to stick bread in the thing and have the K6 make it toast.
will only go so high. Monitors, currently displaying around 72dpi, higher on LCDs, will get up to optical resolution then stop.
That means that the 2d card will only have to be so powerful, the same with the 3d card.
Sound cards will eventually be able to generate realistic sound that includes the full range of our hearing. Then they don't need to get more advanced.
I'm not saying consumers will only need this or that, I'm saying that humans will only be able to come up with this or that. AFter a while, they won't be able to figure out anything more to do with computers. (This will probably end at something like re-creation of worlds, aka massive holodecks)
Think to yourself, what is the biggest, most power-consuming thing a computer could ever do. Ever. It will stop there.
Perhaps it will be miniturized, but applications will stop eventually when there are certain limits, like optical resolution or the range o the human ear. Eventually there will be limits like that for application.
Moore's law will not stop. We will just keep finding newer processes to do things.. (Intel saying it will stop, well hell yeah you can fry pancakes on PIII's probably roast a cow on a Merced) Motorola isn't having many problems on the other hand... Microsoft could be a major part off this, you shouldn't f'ing need a PIII 400 or whatever ffor the operating system.
Apple's only restriction on OS compatibility is chip architecture (you have a PowerPC, it works, 69k it doesnt, this is a natural limit, its practically like trying to install the MacOS on a pc, wrong chipset.)
Hey we haven't even tried optroinic computers or anything yet maybe those will reach our needs. Still s lot that can be done, just ignore intel, they're just overclocking their chips until they melt.
Ahhh an anonymus coward failing to comprehend. So people like you can understand....
Clock Spped is irrelevent when comparing chips of different architectures. (not completely irrelevent, you can compare a g3 to a g3 or a pentium to a pentium, fair enough.)
G4 Clock speed will be up there anyways, so soon they will be defeated in both realms, crappy irrelevent measuring and actual power...
Geez oh well they'll have that beat too.
Is that easier to understand?
G5's will be arriving exactly two years from now specing out 2GHz with a new pipeline and new bus topology, coming in 64 and 32 bit flavors with a newer.10 process (current G4 is.15) and Silicon on Insulator technology (soon to be used on G4, interesting stuff)
Not comparing doubling or suspected improvements there.
Intel will have improved Merceds by that time. Merced is already a large chip, especially with that emulator-sub-processor type thing in it and starting at.18 and most likely moving on to.15 by this time. So its pretty big, and thus pretty hot. (geez hard enough time putting pIII's into laptops...)
Don't bother defending the IA-64. Support another. (K7, motorola's friendly parter's chip maybe?)
I have to agree with brokeninside here. More instructions is irrelevent. CISC to RISC invloves a little more than throwing out several instructions, too, at least on the PPC...
The anonymus coward who calls me an idiot (or maybe he was referring to the CISC is faster guy?) has no proof whatsoever. What can you expect from an anonymuus coward? Why are they even allowed to post?
Core based design apporach... Multiple core based design approach maybe? I dunno, thats how they refer to it... Several cores, in essence, the many different parts, (integer 2x, fpu, altivec.. whatnot.. It mainly to do with the partial separation of them that allows them to do several instructions of different sizes...
601 is the G1, the first PPC... 603's were the low end G2's, 604's the high end G2's. 7xx is the G3, 745's are the new low power ones, 750 were the first G3's and 755 are the standard newer ones. 7400 is the mother of all PPC's the G4.
All are RISC. All able to compete (or outo in 2D) with much higher MHz Pentiums.
Although 4 gigaflops is the very highest - the minimum of 1 billion ops is the real measurement I guess. =) Much higher than Intel's 600million max theoretical. Sure that alitvec makes the max ridiculously high - but even the minimum is much higher...
AltiVec is not like MMX or 3dnow mostly for one reason. You rename a few instructions, press recompile in CodeWarrior, and ding it's AltiVec enhanced. Now tell me how to rewrite a whole program for MMX?
brokeninside also demonstrated something else. That SGI MIPS chip being very low MHz outdoes Px's. MHz is no longer a viable measurement except for similar architectures (if at all). And PPC is definately not like the pentium architecture...
This may not matter by 2001... IA-64 vs. G4 and in a few months later G5. IA-64 starting at roughly 800MHz, sources have said. Now what will G4's or G5's be by that time?? If they double in two years... oh 1+ GHz. Geez oh well.
This kind of thing is never a big deal. Two or three years ago at Macworld SF some company showed off a 550MHz PPC processor (crud, thats as fast as the ffastest g3 availible right now, and at a time of 200-300MHz pentiums and macs... well it was ahead of its time) . Had some fancy-schmancy cooling system too. Company died off in a month or so, oh well.
Other notes of interest:
My Voodoo1 (running at 50MHz) has very little radio shielding. Can't listen to the radio and play quake at the same time...
G4'd still beat the Athlon, I'm fairly sure. I dopn't know everything about them, but unless they have a radically different design aproach from the normal pentium or whatever, they don't touch a g4.
I was explaining this one day to my friend.
G4's use a core-based design approach. In the most basic terms, it's "kinda like a multiprocessor system." I was told by my friend that the normal processor basically does one thing at a time.
And this is pretty much confirmed by some fact sheets on Intel's site explaining how a 600MHz pIII does 600 million floating point ops/sec. (600MillionHertz=600million ops)
The g4 does this differently. Every part of the rpocessor (of course including the floating point unit and AltiVec) can do more than one thing at a time. It has two interger units. That should be self explanitory. It has a 64-bit fpu, than can do 1 64-bit calculation or 2 32-bit and so on... It has 128-bit Altivec which can do 1 128-bit, 2 64-bit, 4 32-bit, 8 16-bit or 16-8 bit. You can then see where Apple got their THEORETICAL max or 4 gigaflops, but it can hold that 1 gigaflop too, which is the big deal.
All PPC instructions are the same size, tradionally. 32-bit. It's part of being a RISC chip, it helps performace some, standardized size(s) of these instructions. A few variants now, but not a big deal, compared to what is normally done on the dark side....
Pentiums and compliant processors do instructions of multiple sizes. Pretty much any size, really, and then they are broken down to smaller sizes... The theoretical max is 600Million for the PIII comes from this. But it cant even hold that, that's the theoretical max (who knows the minimum ops?) while the g4 theoretical max is 4 billion, and minimum 1 billion.
Now I know I went on this tirade abouut pentiums, but frankly, can Athlons be much different? The pentiums are/were a pretty normal CISC architecture. So a 800MHz athlon probably pushes out a very maximum of 900million ops, being extremely generous, most likely 800million. Max.
It can claim to be the fastest PC (personal computer, as opposed to a 1GHz Alpha Monster) by clock cycle alone. Very true. But this does not measure the real potential power of the processor. Theoretical and minimum ops show that.
MegaHertz is an outdated form of speed measurement with things like the core-based design. Basically its like comparing a multiprocessor 500MHz system to a normal 600MHz or 800MHz or whatever single processor system. Are quad PIII 500's or a single 800MHz better? Still can be disputed, depending on what is being run, but one surely has more potential pwoer.
And hey with CodeWarrior already able to do the Altivec stuff, and the libraries out there for months now, they can take advantage of that g4. No problem.
-Curt out.
"Hey there was in eyelash in my nose!?" "How did you know there was an eyelash in your nose?"
Hey that new iMac looks great imho.. but mind youu these are still rumors! They do mean good news, but stop for a second. This is AppleInsider. If they are legit, Apple is not going to be happy about this one...
DVD... cool. They trayless bit makes me feel better, because its no longer a bunch of g3 laptop parts puut together... at least one original part! Now they should put that feature in the g4 laptops too... And I think even newbies have seen a car stero and can understand that floppies don't fit there. Maybe musci CD'swill more often be seen playing on newbie iMacs?
128MB ram in the high end version? I doubt it but would be very nice. Same deal with the rage 128, which I also doubt... but again would be nice. I wish apple would ditch the rage altogether and go for some other card... a voodoo4 maybe which sounds nice... (read about that t-buffer at 3dfx.com!)
13GB hard drive is the big one I'm doubting. That's gonna cost apple a little more than the 6GB one. Just a tad.
Oh and graphite doesn't smell. Sniff your pencil whoever said that. Maybbe its a subliminal message that says this thing can be used for work, or word processing, like a pencil. Whatever.
I'm still kinda pissed it doesn't have a 17" screen, being a graphic designer. Aww heck, I shouldn't even consider the gumdrop, gotta get me a g4 laptop...
Oh so Motorola and AMD have been parters for quite a while already and have done nothing whatsoever? I didn't specifically point out the manufacturing process, but some technolgies have been shared.
Geez if I could moderate comments, I would set most of these to "Offtopic." This isn't about IDE or SCSI guys, cmon...
Anyways......
This may actually happen, unlike every other Apple related RUMOR I've seen on slashdot, this could be true, because AMD and Motorola have made many deals in the past, including some stuff about that nifty K7 processor.
If you've seen or heard of a K7, look at it again. Yup theres quite a bbit of Motorola technology in that sucker.... Wiring, design, etc... Parts of it mysteriously resemble the G4 (really don't want to go into detail here...)
Maybe AMD will finally return the favor and manufacture some G4's... Why not?
ALthought DSL should be improving in speed in the next few years (10Mbit range) it is still based on copper wiring. Copper wiring that is not well-kept or really good quality I might add...
I don't know how they do it in most areas, but where I live (near Earthlink HQ) my cable modem is directly connected to a fiber network. What does that mean? Upgradablility! When fiber becomes affordable to mere mortals, the cable groups already have the network. No copper wires can compare to that stuff.
Also is the added fact that I don't own the cable box itself, and thus don't need to pay for it when it needs to be replaced or upgraded or whatever...
Apple has made it very possible for past users to upgrade and will continue to do so. I recently upgraded my 166MHz 603e to a G3. It can be done even farther back to the original PPC's (60MHz?) They are no orgre and have been very good to customers. With Steve they just like to steal the show. (Did you see the intel booth at Seybold? Completely empty! Laff!!!) I continue to word if this site is becoming an Apple Hater's Rumor Mill. (Past few Apple Articles have been false AND bad PR... geez guys) -Curt
You guys really have to work on your Apple reporting. It makes you look bad. =) First off, Graphite is the least likely color in existance for the new iMacs to be. Steve said that color would be for their professional line. (Wow I want a Graphite/White G4 PowerBook!) And iMacs are not part of their profesissional line. Puut the two lines of code together boys. It may be an option (heck I would like them to be graphite.) , but is ridiculously umnlikely. If you need Apple Info look at www.macosrumors.com. They _seem_ to be the most accurate. (AppleInsider has done so much false info its ridiculous... I know (I'm an Apple Tester... Shhh!)
I know for a fact myself that this is FALSE......but if you read the www.MacOSRumors.com article, well you see this for yourself. Outdated information. Happnes alot. Stop bbelieving something that (I, atleast) consider rather ridiculous. Btw... Shark refers to several of the next motherboards to be released, including Sawtooth, the one that will be shipping around October. (Shark names, ha ha, get it?) Other ones will apparently have Shark names too. Geez guys stop spewing false, bad Apple PR. Same problem with the blue g3-g4 issue. Apple just didn't want some 3rd party company spoiling their party by releasing a g4 first. There will be an update soon(TM) Apparently this caused much distress in the insides of Apple, but it was necessary, and will be changed back to the good side of the force (allowing upgrades). Hey ever seen an Pentium chip come out before Intel said so? Nope. Same general idea. -Curt
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone want to join me hacking this beastie? It would take what, 10-15 minutes TOPS?
Mmm swiss-cheese code. Yummy.
Frankly, no matter how good Linux is, it isn't a consumer operating system yet. I am sometimes baffled by the things mentioned when it gets down to kernals and roots and compiling (oh my!), so an average consumer would just be out of their league.
A real techie (many of which use Linux) would not buy one o these things. They would want the 700 MHz Athlon with 256MB ram and a 20gig hard drive, a GeForce 256, blah, blah, blah.
What techie wants a computer that looks like pastel dung(TM), a puny hard drive, and a general lack of features. The thing is cheap, and I don't mean cost-effective.
Most people don't understand Linux and the ones that do would not want this piece of crap.
Apple when it started it's iMac series was known for being a big player in the education market, and thus a natural move was to actually introduce one that they could afford. But Linux? Cmon now.
CD-ROM optional..... so when you go to buy software is has to be on floppy? Or do they expect that every single person that buys these is going to set it up or the internet and download all their software?
Most consumers don't understand how to do that. All they could figure out to do with this pastel dung(TM) is to stick bread in the thing and have the K6 make it toast.
will only go so high. Monitors, currently displaying around 72dpi, higher on LCDs, will get up to optical resolution then stop.
That means that the 2d card will only have to be so powerful, the same with the 3d card.
Sound cards will eventually be able to generate realistic sound that includes the full range of our hearing. Then they don't need to get more advanced.
I'm not saying consumers will only need this or that, I'm saying that humans will only be able to come up with this or that. AFter a while, they won't be able to figure out anything more to do with computers. (This will probably end at something like re-creation of worlds, aka massive holodecks)
Think to yourself, what is the biggest, most power-consuming thing a computer could ever do. Ever. It will stop there.
Perhaps it will be miniturized, but applications will stop eventually when there are certain limits, like optical resolution or the range o the human ear. Eventually there will be limits like that for application.
Moore's law will not stop. We will just keep finding newer processes to do things.. (Intel saying it will stop, well hell yeah you can fry pancakes on PIII's probably roast a cow on a Merced) Motorola isn't having many problems on the other hand... Microsoft could be a major part off this, you shouldn't f'ing need a PIII 400 or whatever ffor the operating system.
Apple's only restriction on OS compatibility is chip architecture (you have a PowerPC, it works, 69k it doesnt, this is a natural limit, its practically like trying to install the MacOS on a pc, wrong chipset.)
Hey we haven't even tried optroinic computers or anything yet maybe those will reach our needs. Still s lot that can be done, just ignore intel, they're just overclocking their chips until they melt.
Ahhh an anonymus coward failing to comprehend. So people like you can understand....
.10 process (current G4 is .15) and Silicon on Insulator technology (soon to be used on G4, interesting stuff)
.18 and most likely moving on to .15 by this time. So its pretty big, and thus pretty hot. (geez hard enough time putting pIII's into laptops...)
Clock Spped is irrelevent when comparing chips of different architectures. (not completely irrelevent, you can compare a g3 to a g3 or a pentium to a pentium, fair enough.)
G4 Clock speed will be up there anyways, so soon they will be defeated in both realms, crappy irrelevent measuring and actual power...
Geez oh well they'll have that beat too.
Is that easier to understand?
G5's will be arriving exactly two years from now specing out 2GHz with a new pipeline and new bus topology, coming in 64 and 32 bit flavors with a newer
Not comparing doubling or suspected improvements there.
Intel will have improved Merceds by that time. Merced is already a large chip, especially with that emulator-sub-processor type thing in it and starting at
Don't bother defending the IA-64. Support another. (K7, motorola's friendly parter's chip maybe?)
I have to agree with brokeninside here. More instructions is irrelevent. CISC to RISC invloves a little more than throwing out several instructions, too, at least on the PPC...
The anonymus coward who calls me an idiot (or maybe he was referring to the CISC is faster guy?) has no proof whatsoever. What can you expect from an anonymuus coward? Why are they even allowed to post?
Core based design apporach... Multiple core based design approach maybe? I dunno, thats how they refer to it... Several cores, in essence, the many different parts, (integer 2x, fpu, altivec.. whatnot.. It mainly to do with the partial separation of them that allows them to do several instructions of different sizes...
First time I've heard someone oppose RISC. Heh.
Full PPC processor lineup: 601, 603, 603e, 604, 604e, 745, 750, 755, 7400.
601 is the G1, the first PPC... 603's were the low end G2's, 604's the high end G2's. 7xx is the G3, 745's are the new low power ones, 750 were the first G3's and 755 are the standard newer ones. 7400 is the mother of all PPC's the G4.
All are RISC. All able to compete (or outo in 2D) with much higher MHz Pentiums.
Although 4 gigaflops is the very highest - the minimum of 1 billion ops is the real measurement I guess. =) Much higher than Intel's 600million max theoretical. Sure that alitvec makes the max ridiculously high - but even the minimum is much higher...
AltiVec is not like MMX or 3dnow mostly for one reason. You rename a few instructions, press recompile in CodeWarrior, and ding it's AltiVec enhanced. Now tell me how to rewrite a whole program for MMX?
brokeninside also demonstrated something else. That SGI MIPS chip being very low MHz outdoes Px's. MHz is no longer a viable measurement except for similar architectures (if at all). And PPC is definately not like the pentium architecture...
This may not matter by 2001... IA-64 vs. G4 and in a few months later G5. IA-64 starting at roughly 800MHz, sources have said. Now what will G4's or G5's be by that time?? If they double in two years... oh 1+ GHz. Geez oh well.
-Curt
This kind of thing is never a big deal. Two or three years ago at Macworld SF some company showed off a 550MHz PPC processor (crud, thats as fast as the ffastest g3 availible right now, and at a time of 200-300MHz pentiums and macs... well it was ahead of its time) . Had some fancy-schmancy cooling system too. Company died off in a month or so, oh well.
Other notes of interest:
My Voodoo1 (running at 50MHz) has very little radio shielding. Can't listen to the radio and play quake at the same time...
G4'd still beat the Athlon, I'm fairly sure. I dopn't know everything about them, but unless they have a radically different design aproach from the normal pentium or whatever, they don't touch a g4.
I was explaining this one day to my friend.
G4's use a core-based design approach. In the most basic terms, it's "kinda like a multiprocessor system." I was told by my friend that the normal processor basically does one thing at a time.
And this is pretty much confirmed by some fact sheets on Intel's site explaining how a 600MHz pIII does 600 million floating point ops/sec. (600MillionHertz=600million ops)
The g4 does this differently. Every part of the rpocessor (of course including the floating point unit and AltiVec) can do more than one thing at a time. It has two interger units. That should be self explanitory. It has a 64-bit fpu, than can do 1 64-bit calculation or 2 32-bit and so on... It has 128-bit Altivec which can do 1 128-bit, 2 64-bit, 4 32-bit, 8 16-bit or 16-8 bit. You can then see where Apple got their THEORETICAL max or 4 gigaflops, but it can hold that 1 gigaflop too, which is the big deal.
All PPC instructions are the same size, tradionally. 32-bit. It's part of being a RISC chip, it helps performace some, standardized size(s) of these instructions. A few variants now, but not a big deal, compared to what is normally done on the dark side....
Pentiums and compliant processors do instructions of multiple sizes. Pretty much any size, really, and then they are broken down to smaller sizes... The theoretical max is 600Million for the PIII comes from this. But it cant even hold that, that's the theoretical max (who knows the minimum ops?) while the g4 theoretical max is 4 billion, and minimum 1 billion.
Now I know I went on this tirade abouut pentiums, but frankly, can Athlons be much different? The pentiums are/were a pretty normal CISC architecture. So a 800MHz athlon probably pushes out a very maximum of 900million ops, being extremely generous, most likely 800million. Max.
It can claim to be the fastest PC (personal computer, as opposed to a 1GHz Alpha Monster) by clock cycle alone. Very true. But this does not measure the real potential power of the processor. Theoretical and minimum ops show that.
MegaHertz is an outdated form of speed measurement with things like the core-based design. Basically its like comparing a multiprocessor 500MHz system to a normal 600MHz or 800MHz or whatever single processor system. Are quad PIII 500's or a single 800MHz better? Still can be disputed, depending on what is being run, but one surely has more potential pwoer.
And hey with CodeWarrior already able to do the Altivec stuff, and the libraries out there for months now, they can take advantage of that g4. No problem.
-Curt out.
"Hey there was in eyelash in my nose!?"
"How did you know there was an eyelash in your nose?"
Hey that new iMac looks great imho.. but mind youu these are still rumors! They do mean good news, but stop for a second. This is AppleInsider. If they are legit, Apple is not going to be happy about this one...
DVD... cool. They trayless bit makes me feel better, because its no longer a bunch of g3 laptop parts puut together... at least one original part! Now they should put that feature in the g4 laptops too... And I think even newbies have seen a car stero and can understand that floppies don't fit there. Maybe musci CD'swill more often be seen playing on newbie iMacs?
128MB ram in the high end version? I doubt it but would be very nice. Same deal with the rage 128, which I also doubt... but again would be nice. I wish apple would ditch the rage altogether and go for some other card... a voodoo4 maybe which sounds nice... (read about that t-buffer at 3dfx.com!)
13GB hard drive is the big one I'm doubting. That's gonna cost apple a little more than the 6GB one. Just a tad.
Oh and graphite doesn't smell. Sniff your pencil whoever said that. Maybbe its a subliminal message that says this thing can be used for work, or word processing, like a pencil. Whatever.
I'm still kinda pissed it doesn't have a 17" screen, being a graphic designer. Aww heck, I shouldn't even consider the gumdrop, gotta get me a g4 laptop...
Um.... thats about it. =)
-Curt
Oh so Motorola and AMD have been parters for quite a while already and have done nothing whatsoever? I didn't specifically point out the manufacturing process, but some technolgies have been shared.
That was their purpose.
-Curt
Geez if I could moderate comments, I would set most of these to "Offtopic." This isn't about IDE or SCSI guys, cmon...
Anyways......
This may actually happen, unlike every other Apple related RUMOR I've seen on slashdot, this could be true, because AMD and Motorola have made many deals in the past, including some stuff about that nifty K7 processor.
If you've seen or heard of a K7, look at it again. Yup theres quite a bbit of Motorola technology in that sucker.... Wiring, design, etc... Parts of it mysteriously resemble the G4 (really don't want to go into detail here...)
Maybe AMD will finally return the favor and manufacture some G4's... Why not?
-Curt
ALthought DSL should be improving in speed in the next few years (10Mbit range) it is still based on copper wiring. Copper wiring that is not well-kept or really good quality I might add...
I don't know how they do it in most areas, but where I live (near Earthlink HQ) my cable modem is directly connected to a fiber network. What does that mean? Upgradablility! When fiber becomes affordable to mere mortals, the cable groups already have the network. No copper wires can compare to that stuff.
Also is the added fact that I don't own the cable box itself, and thus don't need to pay for it when it needs to be replaced or upgraded or whatever...
My 2 cents.
(Or is it just 1 1/2?)
-Curt
Apple has made it very possible for past users to upgrade and will continue to do so. I recently upgraded my 166MHz 603e to a G3. It can be done even farther back to the original PPC's (60MHz?) They are no orgre and have been very good to customers.
With Steve they just like to steal the show. (Did you see the intel booth at Seybold? Completely empty! Laff!!!)
I continue to word if this site is becoming an Apple Hater's Rumor Mill. (Past few Apple Articles have been false AND bad PR... geez guys)
-Curt
You guys really have to work on your Apple reporting. It makes you look bad. =) First off, Graphite is the least likely color in existance for the new iMacs to be. Steve said that color would be for their professional line. (Wow I want a Graphite/White G4 PowerBook!) And iMacs are not part of their profesissional line. Puut the two lines of code together boys. It may be an option (heck I would like them to be graphite.) , but is ridiculously umnlikely. If you need Apple Info look at www.macosrumors.com. They _seem_ to be the most accurate. (AppleInsider has done so much false info its ridiculous... I know (I'm an Apple Tester... Shhh!)
I know for a fact myself that this is FALSE... ...but if you read the www.MacOSRumors.com article, well you see this for yourself. Outdated information. Happnes alot. Stop bbelieving something that (I, atleast) consider rather ridiculous. Btw... Shark refers to several of the next motherboards to be released, including Sawtooth, the one that will be shipping around October. (Shark names, ha ha, get it?) Other ones will apparently have Shark names too. Geez guys stop spewing false, bad Apple PR. Same problem with the blue g3-g4 issue. Apple just didn't want some 3rd party company spoiling their party by releasing a g4 first. There will be an update soon(TM) Apparently this caused much distress in the insides of Apple, but it was necessary, and will be changed back to the good side of the force (allowing upgrades). Hey ever seen an Pentium chip come out before Intel said so? Nope. Same general idea. -Curt