Non-standard GUI? Compared to what? What the hell is a standard GUI? If anything Apple is the only company that enforces a standard, uniform interface for all applications so the user has a consistent interface. Try to say that about Linux/Unix. *laugh* Don't even mention Win32 varients.
Exactly, and Apple had the first standard commercial GUI on the market. And all the big MS apps like Word and Excel that set standards for business were originally Mac applications.
Motif always looked like Windows 3 (or vice versa?) and Win 95 very obviously borrowed from NeXTSTEP. Look at the window borders, the window buttons, the recycle bin, the taskbar (dock), and the Windows Explorer. All from NeXTSTEP/OPEN STEP (circa 1978).
I think OS X turns off some people because it's pretty, and they want their GUI to look like something from a Sci-fi movie...
I have to admit, Aqua took some getting used to, just because of all the whiteness... but I love it now. Aesthetics do matter to some people.
We buy cars because of the way they look, why not computers/OS's?
Are there still younger geeks than that? I thought we gen-Xers, growing up with Commodore 64's and Apple ]['s, were just about the last of the breed that groks the command line (or even knows where the word "grok" comes from for that matter).
Hey...I'm 44! I still have a Timex/Sinclair 1000!
And it was from the novel "Stranger in
a Strange Land", by Robert A. Heinlein;)
My comments were directed almost squarely at the visible user interface which I found annoying. a) the no-button mouse, after using scroll mice and relying heavily on right-clicking and center-clicking for a while now, the lack of buttons is disconcerting.
You can use any USB mouse or trackball you like. I'm using an MS Itellimouse Optical. I use all the buttons, including clicking on the scroll wheel. Using either the MS software, or USBOverdrive (which the MS software is based on) you can program the buttons for what ever function you like, and different function sets for different applications, which is all automatic.
b) it's ugly, that's an opinion, though, and not a fact.
I don't agree. Windows is ugly, and most of the X11 window managers are not so attractive either. Maybe they just look more technical to you?
c) when you close the last window to an application, the application should quit, or at least ask if you want to quit, OS X leaves it running.
That's also a matter of opinion, and is not the way Mac applications have ever worked, though a few do use this behavior. Mac OS has a common Menu Bar, so it's not a parent/child window based system. There is no parent window to close to quit the application. This is an MS way of doing things, and was never the way Macs worked.
d) no apparent ability for the TCP/IP stuff to autodetect traffic and, if needed, initiate a dialup connection....
Also incorrect... I don't use dial up, but under the PPP options there is a check box that states: "Connect automatically when using TCP applications."
this is all based on very limited exposure to the system.
The fact is that the XServe runs a bunch of IDE hard drives which would seem worthless for any real-world applications without any sort of RAID.
Each IDE drive has it's own controller however, so the performance is better.
Apple Drive Modules use 7200rpm ATA/100 hard disk drives. Each drive has an independent Ultra ATA/100 bus, an arrangement that allows maximum individual drive performance without choking the throughput of the other drives. The ATA drive subsystem has a high-bandwidth I/O bus that minimizes bottlenecks, even when all four drives are engaged at once. That's how Xserve can achieve a theoretical peak performance of up to 266 megabytes per second, compared to a 160MB/s theoretical performance with SCSI Ultra160 disk drives -- at a significantly lower cost, and while generating less heat than SCSI drives.
Apple's point in using IDE drives was the cost. You can get an XServe with more capacity than the other 1U racks, and for a LOT less money.
You can have 480GB of storage per XServe. $7,799.00 for the dual 1GHz version with 480GB and 2.0GB DDR SDRAM @ 266MHz. Price some other system with the same specs.
They do have a RAID coming out, and nothing is stopping you from adding a SCSI RAID PCI card.
The XServe was made because some companies (like Gentec) wanted smaller G4 servers.
The people to whom YDL are aiming their machines are the people who have switched to the Mac from Solaris and Linux and want their X11 chugging along at speed, instead of the relative slowness that it now does.
If what you are referring to is the speed of the GUI of OS X, it's not X11.
However you can install XDarwin, which is the OS X version of XFree86, and your favorite window manager and there you go. You can even run it rootless, right along side native Aqua apps.
But the main problem with this test is that he's testing a dual processor G4 against a single processor Pentium in a multi-threaded app doing highly parallelizable work!! How can we make sense of those results?
Cheaper & faster, too Several readers, including an Apple sales rep, sent me references to a set of Xserve benchmarks on the Apple site. All of these show the Xserve beating competitive models from other companies, including IBM, Sun, and Dell.
What makes two of these results particularly interesting is that they show the value of optimizing software to take advantage of the hardware, reversing an effect I think of as "regression to the dumb" to achieve impressive results.
"Regression to the dumb" reflects, I think, the marketing tendency to focus on simple things that are easy to communicate in a volume market and elevate these simplifications to the level of de-facto standards. Engineers then have to accommodate these standards in product or process design.
The "megahurtz" wars, long a sore point for both Mac and Sun users, seem to illustrate this perfectly. Each new generation of x86 CPUs does less per cycle than the one before, but it drives the claimed megahertz number up because that's the number that moves product. Along the way, some very good technologies have been abandoned, and software developers have been taught to avoid making their code dependent on chip-specific features that could easily go away with the next iteration.
What happens if you look carefully at the technical advantages you've got and optimize your code and hardware accordingly instead of just going with industry-averaging practices?
Apple's PowerPC has an underappreciated facility marketed as the "velocity engine." This is actually a short-array processor with powerful features such as hardware FFT, but, like SPARC's VIS/SIMD, it's more honored in the breach than the observance.
In this case, Apple's Advanced Computation Group, working with Genentech, modified an application widely used in genetics and related research to make maximum use of the facility. As a result, the Blast benchmark, which searches a genetics database for matches, shows the dual 1-GHz Xserve beating an IBM x330 with dual 1.4-GHz P3 CPUs by factors ranging from 5.8 to 21 (and a Sun V100 by up to 52 times) depending on the length and precision of the matches.
Internally, the Xserve has DDR (double data rate) memory feeding a 4-gigabytes-per-second data path to the CPU cache along with four ATA controllers -- one for each disk -- that operate as one. Using Bonnie to compare I/O to a Dell 1650 with dual 1.4-GHz P3 CPUs; SDR (single data rate) memory; and, a single Ultra160 RAID card with 128MB of buffer, Apple finds that the Xserve can be more than twice as fast as the Dell.
Technically, I believe that there are two factors at work here: the Xserve has faster memory and a cleaner data path to the CPU, and Apple's four-way ATA design is both faster and cheaper than the single-path RAID card.
In both cases, better technology used in smarter ways wins. As in, duh? But managerially what they've done here is pretty cool because they're standing up for excellence instead of collapsing the technical tent and going off in search of volume.
It's true that Photoshop has filters optimized for the Mac
Actually the filters are optimized for Intel processors too. Intel gave Adobe the assembly code needed (for MMX at the time, and I'd imagine newer code since). IIRC only two or three PS filters are optimized for AltiVec. I think Photoshop is used a lot because it's the same code base on both platforms.
And this isn't all about filters. There was a lot of transforming and compositing going on.
But I agree that some things run better on one platform or another, and it might have more to do with the OS than the CPU type, and how well a program has been written for that OS (i.e. MS Word).
But the main problem with this test is that he's testing a dual processor G4 against a single processor Pentium in a multi-threaded app doing highly parallelizable work!! How can we make sense of those results?
But the single Pentium was more than twice the clock speed, and we know that a dual 1 GHz computer is not 2 GHz, right?:) Photoshop is kind of buggy on dual G4s... its been known to lock up a lot, and some people remove the MultiProcessor Support Extension. In some tests single CPU G4s outperform the duals.
And as the tests showed, the PC did better at Quake, and other tests on the 'Net have showed PCs outperforming G4s in Adobe After Effects tests (AE runs like a dog in OS X)
The bottom line is that clock speed isn't everything.
Then, how about the figures of people still running 98 or 95? Or even 3.1?
This is true. I think many people buy a PC, or a Mac, and just leave on what ever OS it came with.
These are not people like us mind you.
My brother and his wife are perfect examples.
They each had a PC, my brother a whitebox PC running Windows 3.0 (!) and his wife an old Compaq laptop running 3.1.
This was fine for them, they mostly used it for writing (they are art teachers and poets) until they wanted to get online.
The laptop was the most capable, so they went and got a PCCard modem, but lacked the drivers, and MS removed all the Win 3.1 downloads... so they bought a 333 MHz iMac (green) and are still running Mac OS 8.6... until I get around to upgrading it to 9.2:)
They came over one day and looked at my G4 running OS X, and had this bewildered look on their faces... like a dear in the headlghts. Ha!
Most of my PC using friends are still running Win 98, and one runs NT 4.
Re:"Performance Boost" a result of the MHz myth?
on
Intel Inside For Apple?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Dual 1GHz G4 versus 2.2-GHz Sony Vaio RX690G Digital Studio.
"Rather than argue the point, I decided to conduct my own comparison. Apple even provided the actual Photoshop picture used, a full-color photo over 44 megabytes in size, depicting seven bike riders with colorful bikes and helmets. This is the sort of file that graphic artists have to manipulate on a daily basis.
"Apple also sent me a copy of its actual test protocol, including a Photoshop Actions file, a set of scripts that automated the various rendering functions. They also provided a high-end twin-processor desktop Power Macintosh on which to run the tests.
"The Mac was upgraded to the latest version of Mac OS X, 10.1.5. The Sony had Windows XP. I installed the standard retail versions of Adobe Photoshop 7 on both computers."
"Running the tests proved exceedingly simple because Photoshop displays the actual timing of a rendering process rounded off to tenths of a second. Per Apple's directions, I conducted each test four times to deliver the most accurate results.
"Like all Adobe applications, Photoshop is a bit slow to launch. It took 15 seconds on both computers to get ready for the main event.
"In the nine test runs, the Mac came out on top five times, besting the Sony by up to 8.1 seconds. Where the PC emerged victorious, the margin was usually less than half a second.
"In all, the Mac took a total of 35.5 seconds to complete the nine rendering steps. The PC took 50.1 seconds, making it 41% slower according to my calculator's reckoning.
...
"The upshot of all this, however, is that, when someone tells you a Windows box is always faster than the Mac, point them to this article and tell them it isn't necessarily so."
Of course the PC beat the Mac in a game of Quake;)
(and AFAIK the CPU northbridge on the Xserve was still 133Mhz SDR?)
The specs
Processor Single or dual 1GHz PowerPC G4 processors Velocity Engine vector processing unit Full 128-bit internal memory data paths Powerful floating-point unit supporting single-cycle, double-precision calculations Data stream prefetching operations supporting four simultaneous 32-bit data streams 256K on-chip L2 cache running at processor speed 2MB DDR SRAM L3 cache per processor with up to
4GB/s throughput 133MHz system bus supporting over 1GB/s data throughput
Memory
256MB or 512MB of 266MHz PC2100 DDR SDRAM with up to 2.1GB/s throughput Four DIMM slots supporting up to 2GB of DDR SDRAM using the following:
-- 128MB or 256MB DIMMs (64-bit-wide, 128Mb technology)
-- 512MB DIMMs (64-bit-wide, 256Mb technology)
Re:This is a software solution
on
IBM's Deep View
·
· Score: 2
That would have been my first guess too, but in a scan down www.spec.org, and a google for ``866MHz PPC'' I found _nothing_ that matched at all.
Apple used to sell an 867MHz G4 from July 01 - Jan 02.
That's a Mototola part of course, but I'm sure IBM has a similar PPC CPU.
Re:The death of the zoom tool
on
IBM's Deep View
·
· Score: 2
One thing it shows, though, is the need for vector-bases scalable interfaces...
Like Mac OS X?;)
Re:This is a software solution
on
IBM's Deep View
·
· Score: 2
I did't see anywhere where it said what processor it's using though. A 866MHz what?
Most of IBMs big machines seem to run on PPC chips of one form or another, and 866 is a common speed for G3 CPUs.
except that point releases are now full updates and the point point releases are the "free" ones. 10.1 was the exception to that. 10.2 is the equivalent of 10.5 if they had kept the old version numbering scheme.
Exactly. i think they wanted to get OS X out sooner than later. I had no problem with a few things missing, I could always boot back into OS 9, and I was used to using BeOS and Linux, both of which are less polished than OS 9.
So Apple had a lot of small bug fixes along the way.
i don't personally have any complaints about paying for 10.2. i bought a new mac with 10.0.4 on it and got 10.1 for free. my father however just paid $130 for 10.1 3 months ago, and is now expected to pay another $130 for 10.2. sure, he doesn't have to buy it, but the principle of the thing sucks.
I agree that does suck. When I bought my Mac it came with 9.0.3, so I've done three upgrades so far. 9.1 was $19.95, and I paid for 10.0. I think Apple needs to make some kind of discount for people who bought 10.1 within five months or so.
I'm pretty sure 10.3 will be a paid upgrade. so, is pinot 10.3? if so, it's looking like it's going to be unveiled in January. i suppose that doesn't automatically mean it's going to be RELEASED then.
I think pinot is too soon to be a paid upgrade. The way Apple has always done it is to follow up a major paid release with an update about six months later. I think it will be 10.2.5, or somthing like that. 10.2 is early, but January is too soon for another paid upgrade, unless they are getting greedy! Still, it's nice to have more progress sooner. We could have to wait more than two years between updates like Windows users.;)
ok, so here's the real question... if they're going to be rolling out the next version of os x (pinot) in january, are we all going to be expected to pay another $130?
I doubt it. Apple usually releases a new OS once a year and an update six months later for free.
So it was like 8.0-8.1, 8.5-8.6, 9.0-9.1, 10.0-10.1, 10.2-10.x
You pay for the first one, and get the next one either free, or for $19.95 with a coupon (like I did with 9.1)
The biggest problem with not being able to boot into OS 9 is for diagnosing problems. If the hard drive is hosed (can't be booted from) and I want to run tools on it, I'll boot from an OS 9 CD. If I can't do that, what the hell am I going to do? Boot from an OS X CD that has carbon/cocoa utilities on it? Yeah right, OS X takes up most of the 650MB all by itself. (BTW, Drive X sucks)
The OS X install CD has DriveUtility on it, you can boot and run that, or if the Mac boots at all from the hard drive, boot into single user mode and run fsck.
Also for diagnostics, most new Macs come with the hardware check CD
But this is nothing new. The Norton 5 CD wont boot, or fix my G4, and even some of the newer NUM CDs wont boot some newer machines.
I suppose by that time new bootable utility CDs will be out.
Getting rid of legacy serial ports and going with USB only? People grumbled for a little while and realized, hey, Apple made the right move for me.
I agree with this and I'll explain why I feel this was a good move.
Before I bought my G4 I had a PowerCenter clone, and an old Apple StyleWriter Pro printer. Part of the reason I still had that printer was the fact that it was getting hard to find Mac compatible (serial) printers. Also they cost more! I also wanted a new MS Intellimouse Optical, because my old Logitec Wireless Mouseman wouldn't work with OS 9.
So I bought a $50 USB card and got an Epson USB printer.
When I got my new G4 all this stuff worked. It made me realize that now we have more choices in peripherals than before... just get almost any USB printer or mouse.
You're missing a very real likelihood here which is that some older software that people still use, rely on, or enjoy may no longer be supported by its developers. I can think of lots of older games that have no chance of being ported to OS X because the companies that made them have since moved on.
I have a LOT of software back from when I first got a PowerMac 6100 running System 7.5.5 that wont run in OS 9... it wouldn't even run in OS 8!
We have an old PowerMac 7100 at work with a 266G3 upgrade. We installed Mac OS 9.1 on that machine, but 9.2 wont install. And this is no different than if I tried to install OS 8.0 in this G4... I'm sure it wouldn't run, and I couldn't even boot it from a CD. I've tried it.
At some point you have to give up on old software. Every OS upgrade breaks something, and unless the software developer fixes it you are out of luck.
If someone really needs to run OS 9, keep the machine you have... this is why I still have my old Mac Clone (and also to run LinuxPPC, and it used to run BeOS... but what's the point?).
The only time I run 9 on my G4 is for CubaseVST, and sometimes if Quark is acting up in Classic. As soon as CubaseSX is out, that's it for 9!
Since $1600 worth of mac hardware will be outperformed on any given application by $800 worth of x86 hardware, You are paying $800 for the privlage [privilege] of using OS X.
No it wont, that's just you saying it, and you don't count for much.
The problem scales badly too.
Poorly, not badly. Remember, Mac users are more intelligent!;)
The top end Dual G4 get's [gets] it's clock cleaned by $1500 worth of commodity x86 hardware. So on the high end, you end up paying a $2000 Apple$oft tax for OS X.
Whatever.
Apple's dual 1GHz Xserve was a top performer among dual-CPU machines in
recent Xinet benchmarks, edging Dell's dual 1.4GHz PowerEdge 1650 Server in tests. The Xserve, along with other competing servers from companies such as SGI and Sun, were tested in both "Output Generation" and "Photoshop Open" tests.
And you still have to use a poor excuse for an OS.
As long as you keep slobbering after each new shiny mac, reguardless [regardless] of how outdated the hardware is, Jobs will continue to sell you crap and charge you extra for the "privlage".[privilege]
As I said yesterday, I don't have to have each shiny new Mac, unlike you, who has to make up for your personality disorder by running out and buying the latest PC hardware, because it becomes obsolete in three weeks.;) Also, I can afford Apple hardware, so I'm not too worried about it.
For the good of apple, there needs to be a groundswell of dissent among the apple loyalists. When apple's fanatic user base stops shining Jobs' knob, he will decide to put some hardware reaserch and developement [research and development] dollars into something besides a circuit to give the white LED power indicator 300 levels of fade.
Name a PC maker that spends as much as Apple does on R&D. I'll wait.
Apple is a tech survivor
Wendell Perkins, manager of the JohnsonFamily mutual funds, says that Apple is a tech survivor along with Oracle and Microsoft, according to CNN/Money: "though Apple has been struggling lately (it issued an earnings warning earlier this month), Perkins thinks that the stock is worth a look because it is the only innovative company in the personal computer sector. Apple spent about 7.5 percent of its revenue in the last quarter on research and development, a higher percentage than Dell, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard."
Or you can predict apple's demise as their hardware becomes 3 years obsolete then 4. At this rate, in 5 years there will be a better processor in your microwave than in your computer.
Unlike companies such as Dell and Gateway, who only have commodity hardware to sell, Apple is not just about their hardware. People purchase Macs because it's a system, and will keep purchasing them regardless. You can spend $16k on a Sun running at 800MHz... I don't hear you saying Sun is going out of business. The demise of Apple has been predicted by much smarter than the likes of you since the 1980's!
Yawn!! Why don't you do some R&D on spelling and grammar!
"If you are looking for a new computer and are open to a superior ownership and computing experience, look at an Apple before you buy," states Don Lindich of the Post-Gazette. The "Switch" campaign struck a chord because "with a Mac, programs and peripherals install without fuss, and there are no more missing.dll files, hardware or software conflicts, system slowdowns or surprise crashes. The last time I was forced to reboot my Macintosh was eight months ago, and it was my fault that it crashed."
"When I use a Windows machine, I have to reboot two or three times a day. Though Macs are the computer of choice of most creative professionals in the art, advertising, music, movie and publishing worlds, it seems to me that home users need them the most."
"Not only do Macs really work, they are effortlessly intuitive and fun to use. Switching to Macintosh, I traded Windows' 'Blue Screen of Death' for the Mac OS X (OS 10) 'Blue Screen of Life,' as I like to call it."
Why don't you just come out and say there's more software for you to pirate! Be honest now.
Slashdot Mirror
But you knew that!
Exactly, and Apple had the first standard commercial GUI on the market. And all the big MS apps like Word and Excel that set standards for business were originally Mac applications.
Motif always looked like Windows 3 (or vice versa?) and Win 95 very obviously borrowed from NeXTSTEP. Look at the window borders, the window buttons, the recycle bin, the taskbar (dock), and the Windows Explorer. All from NeXTSTEP/OPEN STEP (circa 1978).
I think OS X turns off some people because it's pretty, and they want their GUI to look like something from a Sci-fi movie...
I have to admit, Aqua took some getting used to, just because of all the whiteness ... but I love it now. Aesthetics do matter to some people.
We buy cars because of the way they look, why not computers/OS's?
Hey...I'm 44! I still have a Timex/Sinclair 1000!
And it was from the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", by Robert A. Heinlein ;)
Remember the Bowie movie?
You can use any USB mouse or trackball you like. I'm using an MS Itellimouse Optical. I use all the buttons, including clicking on the scroll wheel. Using either the MS software, or USBOverdrive (which the MS software is based on) you can program the buttons for what ever function you like, and different function sets for different applications, which is all automatic.
b) it's ugly, that's an opinion, though, and not a fact.
I don't agree. Windows is ugly, and most of the X11 window managers are not so attractive either. Maybe they just look more technical to you?
c) when you close the last window to an application, the application should quit, or at least ask if you want to quit, OS X leaves it running.
That's also a matter of opinion, and is not the way Mac applications have ever worked, though a few do use this behavior. Mac OS has a common Menu Bar, so it's not a parent/child window based system. There is no parent window to close to quit the application. This is an MS way of doing things, and was never the way Macs worked.
d) no apparent ability for the TCP/IP stuff to autodetect traffic and, if needed, initiate a dialup connection....
Also incorrect... I don't use dial up, but under the PPP options there is a check box that states: "Connect automatically when using TCP applications."
this is all based on very limited exposure to the system.
Obviously :)
This is so true. BUT if you really do like The GIMP, nothing is stopping you from running it on OS X.
So aside from all the commercial and shareware apps that OS X has that Linux doesn't, you can still run X11 and many Linux apps on OS X.
And besides ProjectBuilder, OS X does have all the usual CLI UNIX tools, and what ever it doesn't have can be installed.
I run LinuxPPC on my old PowerMac clone, but I prefer OS X anyday. :)
Why run OS 9 when you can install XFree86 on OS X and run X11 apps right along with OS X apps?
And some of the iApps, like iPhoto are OS X only.
Don't expect anything new for OS 9 from Apple.
Each IDE drive has it's own controller however, so the performance is better.
Apple's point in using IDE drives was the cost. You can get an XServe with more capacity than the other 1U racks, and for a LOT less money.
You can have 480GB of storage per XServe. $7,799.00 for the dual 1GHz version with 480GB and 2.0GB DDR SDRAM @ 266MHz. Price some other system with the same specs.
They do have a RAID coming out, and nothing is stopping you from adding a SCSI RAID PCI card.
The XServe was made because some companies (like Gentec) wanted smaller G4 servers.
Check out some XServe benchmarks: Xinet
If what you are referring to is the speed of the GUI of OS X, it's not X11.
However you can install XDarwin, which is the OS X version of XFree86, and your favorite window manager and there you go. You can even run it rootless, right along side native Aqua apps.
Maybe some pople just like Linux better?
That's because Bill Gates wasn't born yet.
Part II
Here's something interesting:
Cheaper & faster, too
Several readers, including an Apple sales rep, sent me references to a set of Xserve benchmarks on the Apple site. All of these show the Xserve beating competitive models from other companies, including IBM, Sun, and Dell.
What makes two of these results particularly interesting is that they show the value of optimizing software to take advantage of the hardware, reversing an effect I think of as "regression to the dumb" to achieve impressive results.
"Regression to the dumb" reflects, I think, the marketing tendency to focus on simple things that are easy to communicate in a volume market and elevate these simplifications to the level of de-facto standards. Engineers then have to accommodate these standards in product or process design.
The "megahurtz" wars, long a sore point for both Mac and Sun users, seem to illustrate this perfectly. Each new generation of x86 CPUs does less per cycle than the one before, but it drives the claimed megahertz number up because that's the number that moves product. Along the way, some very good technologies have been abandoned, and software developers have been taught to avoid making their code dependent on chip-specific features that could easily go away with the next iteration.
What happens if you look carefully at the technical advantages you've got and optimize your code and hardware accordingly instead of just going with industry-averaging practices?
In this case, Apple's Advanced Computation Group, working with Genentech, modified an application widely used in genetics and related research to make maximum use of the facility. As a result, the Blast benchmark, which searches a genetics database for matches, shows the dual 1-GHz Xserve beating an IBM x330 with dual 1.4-GHz P3 CPUs by factors ranging from 5.8 to 21 (and a Sun V100 by up to 52 times) depending on the length and precision of the matches.
Technically, I believe that there are two factors at work here: the Xserve has faster memory and a cleaner data path to the CPU, and Apple's four-way ATA design is both faster and cheaper than the single-path RAID card.
In both cases, better technology used in smarter ways wins. As in, duh? But managerially what they've done here is pretty cool because they're standing up for excellence instead of collapsing the technical tent and going off in search of volume.
Actually the filters are optimized for Intel processors too. Intel gave Adobe the assembly code needed (for MMX at the time, and I'd imagine newer code since). IIRC only two or three PS filters are optimized for AltiVec. I think Photoshop is used a lot because it's the same code base on both platforms.
And this isn't all about filters. There was a lot of transforming and compositing going on.
But I agree that some things run better on one platform or another, and it might have more to do with the OS than the CPU type, and how well a program has been written for that OS (i.e. MS Word).
But the main problem with this test is that he's testing a dual processor G4 against a single processor Pentium in a multi-threaded app doing highly parallelizable work!! How can we make sense of those results?
But the single Pentium was more than twice the clock speed, and we know that a dual 1 GHz computer is not 2 GHz, right? :) Photoshop is kind of buggy on dual G4s... its been known to lock up a lot, and some people remove the MultiProcessor Support Extension. In some tests single CPU G4s outperform the duals.
And as the tests showed, the PC did better at Quake, and other tests on the 'Net have showed PCs outperforming G4s in Adobe After Effects tests (AE runs like a dog in OS X)
The bottom line is that clock speed isn't everything.
This is true. I think many people buy a PC, or a Mac, and just leave on what ever OS it came with.
These are not people like us mind you.
My brother and his wife are perfect examples.
They each had a PC, my brother a whitebox PC running Windows 3.0 (!) and his wife an old Compaq laptop running 3.1.
This was fine for them, they mostly used it for writing (they are art teachers and poets) until they wanted to get online.
The laptop was the most capable, so they went and got a PCCard modem, but lacked the drivers, and MS removed all the Win 3.1 downloads ... so they bought a 333 MHz iMac (green) and are still running Mac OS 8.6... until I get around to upgrading it to 9.2 :)
They came over one day and looked at my G4 running OS X, and had this bewildered look on their faces... like a dear in the headlghts. Ha!
Most of my PC using friends are still running Win 98, and one runs NT 4.
Dual 1GHz G4 versus 2.2-GHz Sony Vaio RX690G Digital Studio.
Of course the PC beat the Mac in a game of Quake ;)
The specs
Apple used to sell an 867MHz G4 from July 01 - Jan 02.
That's a Mototola part of course, but I'm sure IBM has a similar PPC CPU.
Like Mac OS X? ;)
Most of IBMs big machines seem to run on PPC chips of one form or another, and 866 is a common speed for G3 CPUs.
Deep Blue ran on the old PPC604e's!
I would think they are using IBM processors.
Exactly. i think they wanted to get OS X out sooner than later. I had no problem with a few things missing, I could always boot back into OS 9, and I was used to using BeOS and Linux, both of which are less polished than OS 9.
So Apple had a lot of small bug fixes along the way.
i don't personally have any complaints about paying for 10.2. i bought a new mac with 10.0.4 on it and got 10.1 for free. my father however just paid $130 for 10.1 3 months ago, and is now expected to pay another $130 for 10.2. sure, he doesn't have to buy it, but the principle of the thing sucks.
I agree that does suck. When I bought my Mac it came with 9.0.3, so I've done three upgrades so far. 9.1 was $19.95, and I paid for 10.0. I think Apple needs to make some kind of discount for people who bought 10.1 within five months or so.
I'm pretty sure 10.3 will be a paid upgrade. so, is pinot 10.3? if so, it's looking like it's going to be unveiled in January. i suppose that doesn't automatically mean it's going to be RELEASED then.
I think pinot is too soon to be a paid upgrade. The way Apple has always done it is to follow up a major paid release with an update about six months later. I think it will be 10.2.5, or somthing like that. 10.2 is early, but January is too soon for another paid upgrade, unless they are getting greedy! Still, it's nice to have more progress sooner. We could have to wait more than two years between updates like Windows users. ;)
Now you don't care about the territory of the term free being applied to the OS based on BSD which is build internationally...
Mind rephrasing that in English?
Ah, but you want to use American inovations...and not have to pay... typical. What's wrong with your country? They can't make their own computers?
I doubt it. Apple usually releases a new OS once a year and an update six months later for free.
So it was like 8.0-8.1, 8.5-8.6, 9.0-9.1, 10.0-10.1, 10.2-10.x
You pay for the first one, and get the next one either free, or for $19.95 with a coupon (like I did with 9.1)
The OS X install CD has DriveUtility on it, you can boot and run that, or if the Mac boots at all from the hard drive, boot into single user mode and run fsck.
Also for diagnostics, most new Macs come with the hardware check CD
But this is nothing new. The Norton 5 CD wont boot, or fix my G4, and even some of the newer NUM CDs wont boot some newer machines.
I suppose by that time new bootable utility CDs will be out.
I agree with this and I'll explain why I feel this was a good move.
Before I bought my G4 I had a PowerCenter clone, and an old Apple StyleWriter Pro printer. Part of the reason I still had that printer was the fact that it was getting hard to find Mac compatible (serial) printers. Also they cost more! I also wanted a new MS Intellimouse Optical, because my old Logitec Wireless Mouseman wouldn't work with OS 9.
So I bought a $50 USB card and got an Epson USB printer.
When I got my new G4 all this stuff worked. It made me realize that now we have more choices in peripherals than before ... just get almost any USB printer or mouse.
I have a LOT of software back from when I first got a PowerMac 6100 running System 7.5.5 that wont run in OS 9... it wouldn't even run in OS 8!
We have an old PowerMac 7100 at work with a 266G3 upgrade. We installed Mac OS 9.1 on that machine, but 9.2 wont install. And this is no different than if I tried to install OS 8.0 in this G4... I'm sure it wouldn't run, and I couldn't even boot it from a CD. I've tried it.
At some point you have to give up on old software. Every OS upgrade breaks something, and unless the software developer fixes it you are out of luck.
If someone really needs to run OS 9, keep the machine you have ... this is why I still have my old Mac Clone (and also to run LinuxPPC, and it used to run BeOS... but what's the point?).
The only time I run 9 on my G4 is for CubaseVST, and sometimes if Quark is acting up in Classic. As soon as CubaseSX is out, that's it for 9!
No it wont, that's just you saying it, and you don't count for much.
The problem scales badly too.
Poorly, not badly. Remember, Mac users are more intelligent! ;)
The top end Dual G4 get's [gets] it's clock cleaned by $1500 worth of commodity x86 hardware. So on the high end, you end up paying a $2000 Apple$oft tax for OS X.
Whatever.
And you still have to use a poor excuse for an OS.
As long as you keep slobbering after each new shiny mac, reguardless [regardless] of how outdated the hardware is, Jobs will continue to sell you crap and charge you extra for the "privlage".[privilege]
As I said yesterday, I don't have to have each shiny new Mac, unlike you, who has to make up for your personality disorder by running out and buying the latest PC hardware, because it becomes obsolete in three weeks. ;) Also, I can afford Apple hardware, so I'm not too worried about it.
For the good of apple, there needs to be a groundswell of dissent among the apple loyalists. When apple's fanatic user base stops shining Jobs' knob, he will decide to put some hardware reaserch and developement [research and development] dollars into something besides a circuit to give the white LED power indicator 300 levels of fade.
Name a PC maker that spends as much as Apple does on R&D. I'll wait.
Or you can predict apple's demise as their hardware becomes 3 years obsolete then 4. At this rate, in 5 years there will be a better processor in your microwave than in your computer.
Unlike companies such as Dell and Gateway, who only have commodity hardware to sell, Apple is not just about their hardware. People purchase Macs because it's a system, and will keep purchasing them regardless. You can spend $16k on a Sun running at 800MHz... I don't hear you saying Sun is going out of business. The demise of Apple has been predicted by much smarter than the likes of you since the 1980's!
Yawn!! Why don't you do some R&D on spelling and grammar!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Let's see, reasonable prices... $299 for XP Pro Vs. $129 for Mac OS X.
Stability? Ha ha ha ha ha! Yeah, ok.
Multimedia Answers: Macintosh poses fewer problems than Windows
Why don't you just come out and say there's more software for you to pirate! Be honest now.