So we have $1300 for a system that doesn't have a single provider (which means that the people providing different components will never take the blame for what's wrong), doesn't have all the parts tested together, and that we're ignoring assembly labor costs on.
Is this less than what Apple's selling for? Sure. Apple definitely charges a premium. But it's nowhere near what you're claiming.
You can buy a new eMac for $1,099.00.
Built in 17" Monitor (up to 1280 by 960 pixels at 72Hz)
700MHz PowerPC G4
128MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-RW drive
56K internal modem
Comes with OS X and OS 9, AppleWorks, all the iApps etc.
Actually Apple uses Altivec for that too. iTunes rips CDs to MP3s pretty quickly.
As I was typing this I did a test... I ripped a 5:52 song from a 59.7MB stereo AIFF file to a 8.1 MB 192 kbps MP3 file in 42 seconds (6.2x) on a 466 MHz G4.
You obviously didn't notice the Delvian with (blond)hair in the promotionals.
Yeah, I did, and they had Delvians with hair last season. But I'm on the Virginia Hey mailing list, and this is what she said about it. She just moved to LA and will be in some major movie soon.
That would be great! However Virginia Hey says she wouldn't come back to the show unless they made her more human looking... the make up was making her sick, plus she had to shave her head and eyebrows off...
So, has Apple made an attempt to turn people away from USB?
Oh yeah, and another point. Apple stuck its neck out and adopted USB before it was even supported by most PCs. Yeah some PCs has USB ports, but Windows didn't have USB support. All those candy colored USB peripherals that came out after the iMac got the whole USB ball rolling in the first place!
OS X which you can tell is aimed at Windows XP with it's XPish interface.
Ummmmm OS X was out first, by almost a year. XP is clearly the copy, including the name.
And by not supporting FireWire MS is making it so you can't plug your DV camera into your XP box. USB2 doesn't have the sustainable bandwidth to do video, plus it's not peer to peer.
like the Mac fans claimed OS-X was pronounce "Oh Ess Ten". I'm not buying that.
Personally I say "oh ess ex" but Apple says it's OS Ten. OS 10,10.0.4? No. I don't buy it either. But I guess one day we will have an XI...
I don't know what Apple's motovation was for using a roman numeral, but I'll bet you anything MS put an X in the new Windows to confuse it with Mac OS X, same reason they have a "Luna" interface that sort of sounds and looks like "Aqua"
Do you really think that Microsoft can't afford to write anything from the ground up?
I'm sure they can afford to, but when did they ever write anything from the ground up?
Mostly they either rip off other people's code or buy up other products outright.
"Microsoft Convicted of Software Piracy
The French subsidiary of one of the world's most vocal opponents of software piracy has itself been convicted of pirating a French 3D animation program.
This is the first ruling in a dispute that dates back to 1995, when Microsoft bought Softimage, a 3D computer-generated image (CGI) specialist which produced software, violating the intellectual property of a small French software house.
The Commercial Court of Nanterre fined Microsoft France £285,000 in damage and interest for Software piracy. "It's a start," said Maitre Altermann, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, "although Microsoft continues to stall on the provisional execution of the judgment.
Netscape was started by a group of people that left NCSA's Mosaic team.
Right, except the company was originally named Mosaic and they called the browser Netscape. Later they renamed the company Netscape and called the browser Navigator, but this was after they sold the original browser code to Spyglass.
I've read this a few times on the web.... I'm sure you can find it
At this time Microsoft already developed their IE for years and the initial code base has been bought from another company!
Thanks for bringing that up! The true irony, is that the company was Spyglass, and the code was for the Mosaic browser. Mosaic was of course bought by Spyglass from a company also called Mosiac that made a little web browser called Netscape!
Another interesting tidbit, is that MS paid very little for the code, as they worked out a deal in which Spyglass would be paid royalties with every copy of IE that MS sold... but then MS decided to give it away for free, and Spyglass gets nothing in return!
I'm running Mozilla 1.0rc2 on Mac OS X 10.1.4 and it hardly ever crashes... except when my son is playing some games at Nintendo.com or lego.com, and MSIE crashes on those too, but not as much
I really like the tabs in Mozilla too, and it's faster than MSIE.
The Display Card is in the lower 64bit PCI slot, unless you upgrade to the Radeon 8500. The GigE card is in the 32Bit slot, and gets deleted when you get the 8500.
Yeah, after reading a few posts I actually went and read the specs.;-)
this card will most likely be the same Radeon 7500 that is poverty-spec on the G4 Powermac
Apple says you can order it with a Radeon 8500.. see below.
"High-performance PCI slots: Xserve features two full-length 64-bit, 66MHz PCI slots with phenomenal throughput up to 533 MB/s -- ample bandwidth for demanding I/O applications and connectivity to high-performance networking, storage and backup devices.
VGA graphics port: The preinstalled graphics card features a VGA port for connecting to industry-standard VGA displays and KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switches. It supports headless booting by defaulting to a known safe resolution (800 by 600 pixels at 60Hz) and lets you hot-plug a display to the server.
ATI Radeon 8500 graphics processing unit (GPU): If you're a creative professional who plans to use Xserve as a rack-mount workstation, you can order a system with an ATI Radeon 8500 graphics processing unit (with 64MB of DDR video memory, dual display support, and DVI, VGA and S-video connectors) preinstalled in the AGP 4X slot."
It's 2x64 bit 66MHz slots, 1 populated with cheap-ass ATi 32Mb Card
No, the Apple page says:
"With dual 1GHz PowerPC G4s, up to 2GB DDR SDRAM, two 64-bit 66MHz PCI slots (plus a third combination PCI/AGP slot), dual Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, USB and four Ultra ATA/100 Apple Drive Module bays, Apple's top-of-the-line 1U configuration compares favorably not just with 1U competitors, but even with 2U form factors."
So it's two 64-bit PCI slots and one PCI/AGP slot.
The most puzzling thing is if they plan to substitute the SUN renderfarm, as one of the things they like is that they can pack a lot of power in slim racks (14 CPUs on each last time I heard). Maybe they got more space at Emmeryville now;-).
You do know that Apple announced they will start making rackmount G4s right? No details were given however, but it is one more piece of the puzzle.
"For people who would like such a comparision.. this code (after AltiVec and dual processor optimization) runs almost 10 times faster on a dual 800 MHz G4, as compared to a 1 GHz Pentium III (g77)!! If you compare it to a 1 GHz Pentium III with a commercial compiler (Intel Fortran: ifc).. hey, its only fair:-).. the dual G4 800 MHz is still more than 4 times faster!"
"Not convinced? Then read this study done by NASA on the G4's scientific computing potential. In my view, it is probably the most detailed and extensive study done in this regard."
In the NASA document:
"While AltiVec compiler support is not available for general F77 computations, Absoft has implemented AltiVec in a limited number of F90 vector functions and BLAS routines in their the Mac OS v6.2 compiler. These operations are accelerated under AltiVec by providing vectorization and 4-way parallel processing of single precision floating point computations [Reference 6]. To test this feature, a
benchmark code was developed using the F90 "matmul" function, which multiplies matrices in array form. In this test, 200x200 matrices A and B were multiplied to form the 200x200 matrix C, and the computation was repeated 100 iterations for more accurate timing."
Table 4: "Summary of F90 'matmul' Benchmarks" shows that when code is written to use Altivec a 500MHz G4, running Mac OS 9 completed the test in 1.5 seconds and scored 1067 MFLOPS. A 800MHz Pentium III running Red Hat Linux completed the test in 10.3 seconds and scored 155 MFOPS. The next fastest after the G4 was a 500Mhz Alpha 21264 running Red Hat. It did 286 MFLOPS in 5.6 seconds.
"The MFLOPS benchmark was obtained by dividing the time benchmark into the number of floating point
operations (FLOP) needed to perform the matrix multiplication with traditional scalar computations (involving nested DO loops). Using an operation count of 1 FLOP for each scalar multiply and add, the multiplication of NxN matrices requires approximately 2N3 FLOP [Reference 9]. For 200x200 matrices,
repeated 100 times, this results in a total of 1596000000 FLOP, or 1.596 GFLOP."
http://floyd.liunet.edu/~gkhanna/NASA_G4_Study.pdf
Slashdot Mirror
Is this less than what Apple's selling for? Sure. Apple definitely charges a premium. But it's nowhere near what you're claiming.
You can buy a new eMac for $1,099.00.
Built in 17" Monitor (up to 1280 by 960 pixels at 72Hz)
700MHz PowerPC G4
128MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-RW drive
56K internal modem
Comes with OS X and OS 9, AppleWorks, all the iApps etc.
Great for Grandma!
No, they are processor "daughter boards" that plug into the Motherboard. And yes, they are in speeds ranging from 750MHz to 1GHz.
All Macs have had PCI slots since about 1995. My G4 (Digital Audio) tower has 4 64-bit 33Mhz PCI slots, and 1 266Mhz (4x) AGP slot.
The iMacs, eMac and the G4 Cube do not have PCI slots.
Actually Apple uses Altivec for that too. iTunes rips CDs to MP3s pretty quickly.
As I was typing this I did a test... I ripped a 5:52 song from a 59.7MB stereo AIFF file to a 8.1 MB 192 kbps MP3 file in 42 seconds (6.2x) on a 466 MHz G4.
I know, I missed a few too, like the whole Crichton clone thing.
Actually the clip that they show in the promotionals was the one from last season. There was a man and a woman Delvian, that both had hair.
he he he!
Yeah, I did, and they had Delvians with hair last season. But I'm on the Virginia Hey mailing list, and this is what she said about it. She just moved to LA and will be in some major movie soon.
Bialar Crais, Aeryn Sun, Chiana, Ka D'Argo, Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan, John Crichton, Joolushko Tunay Fento Hovalis, Rygel XVI, Scorpius, Stark, Pilot, Moya and Talyn.
That would be great! However Virginia Hey says she wouldn't come back to the show unless they made her more human looking... the make up was making her sick, plus she had to shave her head and eyebrows off...
Oh yeah, and another point. Apple stuck its neck out and adopted USB before it was even supported by most PCs. Yeah some PCs has USB ports, but Windows didn't have USB support. All those candy colored USB peripherals that came out after the iMac got the whole USB ball rolling in the first place!
Ummmmm OS X was out first, by almost a year. XP is clearly the copy, including the name.
And by not supporting FireWire MS is making it so you can't plug your DV camera into your XP box. USB2 doesn't have the sustainable bandwidth to do video, plus it's not peer to peer.
And iLink isn't even powered...
It's crippled FireWire.
Personally I say "oh ess ex" but Apple says it's OS Ten. OS 10,10.0.4? No. I don't buy it either. But I guess one day we will have an XI...
I don't know what Apple's motovation was for using a roman numeral, but I'll bet you anything MS put an X in the new Windows to confuse it with Mac OS X, same reason they have a "Luna" interface that sort of sounds and looks like "Aqua"
I'm sure they can afford to, but when did they ever write anything from the ground up?
Mostly they either rip off other people's code or buy up other products outright.
"Microsoft Convicted of Software Piracy
The French subsidiary of one of the world's most vocal opponents of software piracy has itself been convicted of pirating a French 3D animation program.
This is the first ruling in a dispute that dates back to 1995, when Microsoft bought Softimage, a 3D computer-generated image (CGI) specialist which produced software, violating the intellectual property of a small French software house.
The Commercial Court of Nanterre fined Microsoft France £285,000 in damage and interest for Software piracy. "It's a start," said Maitre Altermann, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, "although Microsoft continues to stall on the provisional execution of the judgment.
CW360 - November 30th 2001"
I certainly don't agree with you here. I'm running OS X and 9 and fonts look much better in X.
I have no kerning problems. The kerning and hinting tables are built into the font. I'm using mostly Type 2 PostScript fonts anyway.
Right, except the company was originally named Mosaic and they called the browser Netscape. Later they renamed the company Netscape and called the browser Navigator, but this was after they sold the original browser code to Spyglass.
I've read this a few times on the web.... I'm sure you can find it
Thanks for bringing that up! The true irony, is that the company was Spyglass, and the code was for the Mosaic browser. Mosaic was of course bought by Spyglass from a company also called Mosiac that made a little web browser called Netscape! Another interesting tidbit, is that MS paid very little for the code, as they worked out a deal in which Spyglass would be paid royalties with every copy of IE that MS sold ... but then MS decided to give it away for free, and Spyglass gets nothing in return!
I really like the tabs in Mozilla too, and it's faster than MSIE.
Yeah, after reading a few posts I actually went and read the specs. ;-)
You said, and I quote: "It's 2x64 bit 66MHz slots, 1 populated with cheap-ass ATi 32Mb Card "
Ok, my mistake... it wasn't clearly phrased. You did say:
1 32bit PCI/AGP 4x combo slot, populated with GigE card in standard conmfig.
I think the display card is in the AGP slot under the open slot.
Apple says you can order it with a Radeon 8500.. see below.
"High-performance PCI slots: Xserve features two full-length 64-bit, 66MHz PCI slots with phenomenal throughput up to 533 MB/s -- ample bandwidth for demanding I/O applications and connectivity to high-performance networking, storage and backup devices.
VGA graphics port: The preinstalled graphics card features a VGA port for connecting to industry-standard VGA displays and KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switches. It supports headless booting by defaulting to a known safe resolution (800 by 600 pixels at 60Hz) and lets you hot-plug a display to the server.
ATI Radeon 8500 graphics processing unit (GPU): If you're a creative professional who plans to use Xserve as a rack-mount workstation, you can order a system with an ATI Radeon 8500 graphics processing unit (with 64MB of DDR video memory, dual display support, and DVI, VGA and S-video connectors) preinstalled in the AGP 4X slot."
No, the Apple page says: "With dual 1GHz PowerPC G4s, up to 2GB DDR SDRAM, two 64-bit 66MHz PCI slots (plus a third combination PCI/AGP slot), dual Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, USB and four Ultra ATA/100 Apple Drive Module bays, Apple's top-of-the-line 1U configuration compares favorably not just with 1U competitors, but even with 2U form factors."
So it's two 64-bit PCI slots and one PCI/AGP slot.
But that is part of the Spider-Man story. He eventually ended up marrying Mary Jane.
You do know that Apple announced they will start making rackmount G4s right? No details were given however, but it is one more piece of the puzzle.
From:Computing using Mac OS X
"For people who would like such a comparision .. this code (after AltiVec and dual processor optimization) runs almost 10 times faster on a dual 800 MHz G4, as compared to a 1 GHz Pentium III (g77)!! If you compare it to a 1 GHz Pentium III with a commercial compiler (Intel Fortran: ifc) .. hey, its only fair :-) .. the dual G4 800 MHz is still more than 4 times faster!"
"Not convinced? Then read this study done by NASA on the G4's scientific computing potential. In my view, it is probably the most detailed and extensive study done in this regard."
In the NASA document:
"While AltiVec compiler support is not available for general F77 computations, Absoft has implemented AltiVec in a limited number of F90 vector functions and BLAS routines in their the Mac OS v6.2 compiler. These operations are accelerated under AltiVec by providing vectorization and 4-way parallel processing of single precision floating point computations [Reference 6]. To test this feature, a benchmark code was developed using the F90 "matmul" function, which multiplies matrices in array form. In this test, 200x200 matrices A and B were multiplied to form the 200x200 matrix C, and the computation was repeated 100 iterations for more accurate timing."
Table 4: "Summary of F90 'matmul' Benchmarks" shows that when code is written to use Altivec a 500MHz G4, running Mac OS 9 completed the test in 1.5 seconds and scored 1067 MFLOPS. A 800MHz Pentium III running Red Hat Linux completed the test in 10.3 seconds and scored 155 MFOPS. The next fastest after the G4 was a 500Mhz Alpha 21264 running Red Hat. It did 286 MFLOPS in 5.6 seconds.
"The MFLOPS benchmark was obtained by dividing the time benchmark into the number of floating point operations (FLOP) needed to perform the matrix multiplication with traditional scalar computations (involving nested DO loops). Using an operation count of 1 FLOP for each scalar multiply and add, the multiplication of NxN matrices requires approximately 2N3 FLOP [Reference 9]. For 200x200 matrices, repeated 100 times, this results in a total of 1596000000 FLOP, or 1.596 GFLOP." http://floyd.liunet.edu/~gkhanna/NASA_G4_Study.pdf