You mean like the Network Server 500 and 700? Those were kickass *Nix boxes, unlike the +50 servers (8550, 9650 et al) which were desktops with different software packages (They came with AppleShare and later AppleShare IP).
The xServe is a logical successor to the Network Server line. Oh, and you might be shocked at the benchmarks for those 7200RPM IDE drives, they won't match your 10k or 15k SCSI drives, but they'll come closer than you would think.
The 911 engine does fit (With a reworked set of mounts, teh Beetle is only setup for a 4 cylinder engine). Same basic chassis. And a Beetle (As opposed to a New Beetle, which is a Golf) is RWD, and most of the suspension upgrades are compatible. The 911 is a heavily modified Beetle.
Umm, that would be why Sun is replacing OpenWindows with Gnome?
Java is dead as more than a webscripting and teaching language. Too bad, it had promise, but Python runs circles around it when it comes to backwards-compatability, memory footprint and cross-platform capability.
Nope, it's an NForce based chipset, but with a GeForce3.5 GPU and an Intel P3 based processor (It's not quite a celeron, not quite a P3). No Via guts to be found.
BIOS is custom, and there's no legacy support in the chipset.
On Enterprise class stuff, It's a toss-up between Sun and HP. Solaris would be #1, but HP-UX+True64 is larger than just Solaris, AIX also would be more common than Linux. Enterprise != Your webserver.
Linux is probably in a dead heat with Solaris on the low-end server Unix, and it's a MAc OS/Linux race on the Desktop, with Mac OS X way out front.
Try Kevin Smith's Green Arrow & Daredevil stuff or even the J&SB Comics, Sandman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Any Frank Miller stuff, Preacher, Hellboy or The Crow. And while these compare to Manga quality-wise and storyline-wise, they don't when it comes to sheer breadth of subject matter. Manga in Japan is the equivalent of the North American Comic, Porn and Paperback Novel industries.
The Heavy Metal stuff is OK, and Spawn is crap these days.
The Spec includes a Intel Mini-PCI card that's about 2 years behind current state-of-the-art. Come on Intel, 802.11a has been dead for 2 years, 802.11g is the real 802.11b replacement.
And of course, Apple's gone to 802.11g (which is backwards-compatible to 802.11b, unlike 802.11a) and Apple was the one that pioneered integrated WiFi (Airport Anyone?).
Sure, 802.11g is not a finalized spec, but since products are shipping, it will be soon(They're going to have to be).
So, what we have here is a spec for an Intel based solution, that still won't match Apple in Battery Life (If it does, it's going to be running much slower than your G4), is maybe a bit faster, will often include a piss-poor video chip (worse than what apple was shipping 5 years ago), in crappy cases, with no integrated Firewire(Let alone ieee1394b/Firewire 800), likely no DVI-I support, poor screens (Apple still wins on LCD quality, over most comparably priced laptops), likely doesn't offer a SuperDrive or GigE.
Firewire? Show me another 400Mb/s Plug'n'Play Serial bus that was available in 1999. Well, there's always FC-AL, but it ain't exactly competition.
SCSI? First showed up in Sparcs et al, showed up on the PC and Mac at the same time, was common on Mac back when a good PC setup was RLL. CD-ROM's? 1x and 2x drives showed up on retail macs at about the same time as PC's. CD-R's were common in the mac world earlier. And Mac's came with a Hard Drive standard before most PC's did. Ditto Multihead displays (Mac II, 1987).
Sure SDRAM showed up on the PC first, but the form factor was on the Mac first (All PCI, Non-Performa Mac's use DIMMs)
Apple pioneered the Mouse, WYSIWYG and bitmapped Displays, Intelligent busses (NuBus), Multihead displays, Multitasking (Their solution was better when decent single app performance wasn't cheap, pre-emptive multitasking only really became viable in 1993-1994 in the consumer market, boxes simply were too slow before that. There's a reason apps were more responsive on a Mac than an Amiga of the same speed, although the Amiga handled multiple apps better.)
Apple even pioneered the idea of a daisy chained serial bus (ADB, 1986) and then was the real push behind USB (Which was dead in the water until the iMac).
Sure, they did borrow a few good ideas from the PC world, but much less than the PC world has taken from them.
Umm, Apple Killed the clones 6 years ago. The clones showed up about 10 years ago, and spent several years hemorraging cash because of it. (Hint, the first clones were PPC601/NuBus boxes, the last was a quad processor 200MHz 604e box).
Apple!=PC market. Tech wise, the previous poster had a point, sales/marketing wise, you almost do.
Oh, Come one. The Times has a well documented track record of printing unsubstantiated bullshit. They may have been the Best Paper in the World 15 years ago, but they sure as hell ain't much more than a well respected World Weekly News today. Just follow OpinionJournal's Best of the Web, they regularly debunk NYTimes articles with cold hard facts.
I did love the writeup on how Saddam never gassed his oown people from last week. Considering the author of that piece had been debunked by even Amnesty International, it was a hoot.
Meh, Code forks in Commercial programs are nothing new. How do you think BSD originated in the first place? (UCB forked the AT&T Unix code).
Or OS/2? Or every other major unix out there (Code forks off BSD or SysV, or both in the case of Solaris, the only OS that is really a fork of itself).
Or OS X (NextStep/Openstep fork over to FreeBSD/Mach)
And obviously you didn't actually understand what he said.
There were 2 filesystem images. One was aboot image (usually an image of a 2.88MB floppy) and the other was a BFS image (Install filesystem image). So he did need to burn both to a disc in order to boot it.
There are other things you can put on a CD-R other than a ISO image.
You are aware that even the lowly Pentium has a 64Bit Data Bus. So you are still transferring 64 bits across the data bus (Provided your MB has a 64 bit PCI bus) when you hit the drive controller.
Data bus width !=CPU bit width. (Otherwise P4's would be 256bit, for it's Cache bus)
The rest of your post is essentially correc (Although Sun is very much competing with teh high-end x86 servers, in the Internet server space. They're doing moderately well too.)
Actually the Mac's used the 'PC on a Card' method, there was a complete x86 PC on the add in card, with KVM hooks, disk data, and power being the only 2 things that ran over the bus.
You could probably do this over any architecture that ran on a ptp bus like the Athlon/Alpha (They share a basic bus protocol), but not on a system that does SMP via a shared bus (Pentium3 or PowerPC, possibly P4). It would be non-trivial, due to memory issues though. The two processors would need to share a bus protocol, so likely the Alpha/Athlon combination would be the only doable combination.
Actually, the G4 and G3's support reduced speed for increased power (That's how they hit 5-6 hour battery life, it's more like 3 hours at full speed), in fact the Mac had this feature before the PC ever did (IIRC it was introduced in the '040 era).
And the P4 Mobile doesn't crunch data as fast as the P4 Desktop, even at top speed. It's not much slower (Unlike older mobile pentiums), but it is slower.
I agree with your last statement in full, but you miht be surprised how little of a penalty you pay going to a Radeom Mobility 9000 or GeForce 440 Go on a P4 Mobile or G4 based laptop. These days a low end laptop (With a Radeom Mobility and a Celeron 1.2GHz CPU) is a better gaming platform than the equivalent low-end PC (With the Celeron 1.8 or low end Athlon and crappy onboard graphics.
Yeah, it might, except that every test so far indicates that when it comes to visual quality, the ATI R300 does more with less than the NV30. Calculation accuracy means nothing if the rest of the part can't use it, and the indications are so far that the NV30 needs the more accurate calculations to keep up with the R300's superior display output, especially with AA and Anisotrpic filtering.
Well, consider that the 1GHz G4 will run circles around the 1.2GHz and 1.33GHz P3 and Celeron's currently available in low-end laptops while still having 2-3x the battery life of those laptops. The G4 is a much more efficient CPU when it comes to power dissipation, as compared to any mobile CPU other than the Crusoe (Which is slower than anything other than a Via C3).
And I Think you'll find that the 1GHz G4 in the 15" and 17" Powerbooks compares pretty well to a 2GHz Mobile P4. The Mobile P4 is noticably slower than a desktop P4, and the G4 is pretty competetive with a 1.6GHz or 1.7GHz Desktop P4.
Is the 1GHz G4 faster than a 2.0GHz mobile P4? likely only in FPU or SIMD stuff, if at all, is it in the same ballpark (And Likely faster than the 1.6-1.8GHz Mobile Celeron's), sure. It's got at least a 1.5x advantage at the same clock speed over the P4, and it's not a performance-crippled Mobile part, so I can see it doing in the mobile market what it can only dream of doing in the desktop market.
The Powerbooks compete much better than PowerMacs when comparing them to the equivalent PC's. They have a big advantage in being able to use desktop CPU's instead of purpose built, crippled Mobile CPU's.
1. CPU's draw less power. While Apple uses the same CPUs in it's laptops as it's desktops (And the same core logic), it's CPU's are very energy efficient. This does allow them to have a nearly unnoticable performance gap, unlike the desktop world (A 1.8GHz Mobile P4 is not faster than a 1GHz standard G4).
2. Big Honking batteries. Apple uses 47, 55 and 61 watt-hour batteries, most PC laptops top out at 38-40 watt-hours. Between this and the much lower draw CPU's is why 'Books see 4-6 hour battery life and PC's see 2.5 hours on a good day.
3. High Quality Batteries. Apple buys Sony batteries. This is one reason that you seem to get less laptop for more cash. It's also a reason why apple batteries last 3-5 years and PC batteries don't. Cheap ass batteries (Like those in low-end Thinkpads) don't last.
These laptops are 3-4 years old. Laptop batteries last 1-2 years under moderate use, less if you recharge more often (Heavily used ones last under 6 months sometimes).
He never indicated which looked better, all he said was that ATI was faster in ARB2 mode, which may or may not be due to the differences in precision. Every review I've read indicates that ATI has either a slight or a major advantage in visual quality, depending on settings (ATI aquires a much bigger lead in quality as the settings are lowered.) and that ATI aquired a lead in speed as quality settings go up. Notably, the Radeon 9700 Pro also looks as good at 6x AA as the NV30 does at 8x AA.
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You mean like the Network Server 500 and 700? Those were kickass *Nix boxes, unlike the +50 servers (8550, 9650 et al) which were desktops with different software packages (They came with AppleShare and later AppleShare IP).
The xServe is a logical successor to the Network Server line. Oh, and you might be shocked at the benchmarks for those 7200RPM IDE drives, they won't match your 10k or 15k SCSI drives, but they'll come closer than you would think.
The 911 engine does fit (With a reworked set of mounts, teh Beetle is only setup for a 4 cylinder engine). Same basic chassis. And a Beetle (As opposed to a New Beetle, which is a Golf) is RWD, and most of the suspension upgrades are compatible. The 911 is a heavily modified Beetle.
Umm, that would be why Sun is replacing OpenWindows with Gnome? Java is dead as more than a webscripting and teaching language. Too bad, it had promise, but Python runs circles around it when it comes to backwards-compatability, memory footprint and cross-platform capability.
Nope, it's an NForce based chipset, but with a GeForce3.5 GPU and an Intel P3 based processor (It's not quite a celeron, not quite a P3). No Via guts to be found.
BIOS is custom, and there's no legacy support in the chipset.
On Enterprise class stuff, It's a toss-up between Sun and HP. Solaris would be #1, but HP-UX+True64 is larger than just Solaris, AIX also would be more common than Linux. Enterprise != Your webserver.
Linux is probably in a dead heat with Solaris on the low-end server Unix, and it's a MAc OS/Linux race on the Desktop, with Mac OS X way out front.
Meh, they don't really compare to Manga.
Try Kevin Smith's Green Arrow & Daredevil stuff or even the J&SB Comics, Sandman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Any Frank Miller stuff, Preacher, Hellboy or The Crow. And while these compare to Manga quality-wise and storyline-wise, they don't when it comes to sheer breadth of subject matter. Manga in Japan is the equivalent of the North American Comic, Porn and Paperback Novel industries.
The Heavy Metal stuff is OK, and Spawn is crap these days.
The Spec includes a Intel Mini-PCI card that's about 2 years behind current state-of-the-art. Come on Intel, 802.11a has been dead for 2 years, 802.11g is the real 802.11b replacement.
And of course, Apple's gone to 802.11g (which is backwards-compatible to 802.11b, unlike 802.11a) and Apple was the one that pioneered integrated WiFi (Airport Anyone?).
Sure, 802.11g is not a finalized spec, but since products are shipping, it will be soon(They're going to have to be).
So, what we have here is a spec for an Intel based solution, that still won't match Apple in Battery Life (If it does, it's going to be running much slower than your G4), is maybe a bit faster, will often include a piss-poor video chip (worse than what apple was shipping 5 years ago), in crappy cases, with no integrated Firewire(Let alone ieee1394b/Firewire 800), likely no DVI-I support, poor screens (Apple still wins on LCD quality, over most comparably priced laptops), likely doesn't offer a SuperDrive or GigE.
And I want one because??
Pioneered= Brought it to the masses, not invented it (Otherwise I would have said 'Apple Invented the Mouse')
Firewire? Show me another 400Mb/s Plug'n'Play Serial bus that was available in 1999. Well, there's always FC-AL, but it ain't exactly competition.
SCSI? First showed up in Sparcs et al, showed up on the PC and Mac at the same time, was common on Mac back when a good PC setup was RLL. CD-ROM's? 1x and 2x drives showed up on retail macs at about the same time as PC's. CD-R's were common in the mac world earlier. And Mac's came with a Hard Drive standard before most PC's did. Ditto Multihead displays (Mac II, 1987).
Sure SDRAM showed up on the PC first, but the form factor was on the Mac first (All PCI, Non-Performa Mac's use DIMMs)
Apple pioneered the Mouse, WYSIWYG and bitmapped Displays, Intelligent busses (NuBus), Multihead displays, Multitasking (Their solution was better when decent single app performance wasn't cheap, pre-emptive multitasking only really became viable in 1993-1994 in the consumer market, boxes simply were too slow before that. There's a reason apps were more responsive on a Mac than an Amiga of the same speed, although the Amiga handled multiple apps better.)
Apple even pioneered the idea of a daisy chained serial bus (ADB, 1986) and then was the real push behind USB (Which was dead in the water until the iMac).
Sure, they did borrow a few good ideas from the PC world, but much less than the PC world has taken from them.
Umm, Apple Killed the clones 6 years ago. The clones showed up about 10 years ago, and spent several years hemorraging cash because of it. (Hint, the first clones were PPC601/NuBus boxes, the last was a quad processor 200MHz 604e box).
Apple!=PC market. Tech wise, the previous poster had a point, sales/marketing wise, you almost do.
Oh, Come one. The Times has a well documented track record of printing unsubstantiated bullshit. They may have been the Best Paper in the World 15 years ago, but they sure as hell ain't much more than a well respected World Weekly News today. Just follow OpinionJournal's Best of the Web, they regularly debunk NYTimes articles with cold hard facts.
I did love the writeup on how Saddam never gassed his oown people from last week. Considering the author of that piece had been debunked by even Amnesty International, it was a hoot.
Meh, Code forks in Commercial programs are nothing new. How do you think BSD originated in the first place? (UCB forked the AT&T Unix code).
Or OS/2? Or every other major unix out there (Code forks off BSD or SysV, or both in the case of Solaris, the only OS that is really a fork of itself).
Or OS X (NextStep/Openstep fork over to FreeBSD/Mach)
And obviously you didn't actually understand what he said.
There were 2 filesystem images. One was aboot image (usually an image of a 2.88MB floppy) and the other was a BFS image (Install filesystem image). So he did need to burn both to a disc in order to boot it.
There are other things you can put on a CD-R other than a ISO image.
ANd those were BFS images, not ISO9660 images (Which is what ISO's are).
You are aware that even the lowly Pentium has a 64Bit Data Bus. So you are still transferring 64 bits across the data bus (Provided your MB has a 64 bit PCI bus) when you hit the drive controller.
Data bus width !=CPU bit width. (Otherwise P4's would be 256bit, for it's Cache bus)
The rest of your post is essentially correc (Although Sun is very much competing with teh high-end x86 servers, in the Internet server space. They're doing moderately well too.)
Actually the Mac's used the 'PC on a Card' method, there was a complete x86 PC on the add in card, with KVM hooks, disk data, and power being the only 2 things that ran over the bus.
You could probably do this over any architecture that ran on a ptp bus like the Athlon/Alpha (They share a basic bus protocol), but not on a system that does SMP via a shared bus (Pentium3 or PowerPC, possibly P4). It would be non-trivial, due to memory issues though. The two processors would need to share a bus protocol, so likely the Alpha/Athlon combination would be the only doable combination.
NT Alpha is both a 32Bit version and has been EOL'd (Although it lasted longer than NT PPC).
Windows 64 is due out Real Soon now, and it's delay is likely at least half the reason the Athlon 64 has been pushed back.
Itanium 2 is going to have to make up for the pathetic performance of the first revision (Which seems to perform on par with a Via C3)
The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps the race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
- Green Hills of Earth
--
Actually, the G4 and G3's support reduced speed for increased power (That's how they hit 5-6 hour battery life, it's more like 3 hours at full speed), in fact the Mac had this feature before the PC ever did (IIRC it was introduced in the '040 era).
And the P4 Mobile doesn't crunch data as fast as the P4 Desktop, even at top speed. It's not much slower (Unlike older mobile pentiums), but it is slower.
I agree with your last statement in full, but you miht be surprised how little of a penalty you pay going to a Radeom Mobility 9000 or GeForce 440 Go on a P4 Mobile or G4 based laptop. These days a low end laptop (With a Radeom Mobility and a Celeron 1.2GHz CPU) is a better gaming platform than the equivalent low-end PC (With the Celeron 1.8 or low end Athlon and crappy onboard graphics.
Yeah, it might, except that every test so far indicates that when it comes to visual quality, the ATI R300 does more with less than the NV30. Calculation accuracy means nothing if the rest of the part can't use it, and the indications are so far that the NV30 needs the more accurate calculations to keep up with the R300's superior display output, especially with AA and Anisotrpic filtering.
Well, consider that the 1GHz G4 will run circles around the 1.2GHz and 1.33GHz P3 and Celeron's currently available in low-end laptops while still having 2-3x the battery life of those laptops. The G4 is a much more efficient CPU when it comes to power dissipation, as compared to any mobile CPU other than the Crusoe (Which is slower than anything other than a Via C3).
And I Think you'll find that the 1GHz G4 in the 15" and 17" Powerbooks compares pretty well to a 2GHz Mobile P4. The Mobile P4 is noticably slower than a desktop P4, and the G4 is pretty competetive with a 1.6GHz or 1.7GHz Desktop P4.
Is the 1GHz G4 faster than a 2.0GHz mobile P4? likely only in FPU or SIMD stuff, if at all, is it in the same ballpark (And Likely faster than the 1.6-1.8GHz Mobile Celeron's), sure. It's got at least a 1.5x advantage at the same clock speed over the P4, and it's not a performance-crippled Mobile part, so I can see it doing in the mobile market what it can only dream of doing in the desktop market.
The Powerbooks compete much better than PowerMacs when comparing them to the equivalent PC's. They have a big advantage in being able to use desktop CPU's instead of purpose built, crippled Mobile CPU's.
Apple does 3 things right on the power front.
1. CPU's draw less power. While Apple uses the same CPUs in it's laptops as it's desktops (And the same core logic), it's CPU's are very energy efficient. This does allow them to have a nearly unnoticable performance gap, unlike the desktop world (A 1.8GHz Mobile P4 is not faster than a 1GHz standard G4).
2. Big Honking batteries. Apple uses 47, 55 and 61 watt-hour batteries, most PC laptops top out at 38-40 watt-hours. Between this and the much lower draw CPU's is why 'Books see 4-6 hour battery life and PC's see 2.5 hours on a good day.
3. High Quality Batteries. Apple buys Sony batteries. This is one reason that you seem to get less laptop for more cash. It's also a reason why apple batteries last 3-5 years and PC batteries don't. Cheap ass batteries (Like those in low-end Thinkpads) don't last.
These laptops are 3-4 years old. Laptop batteries last 1-2 years under moderate use, less if you recharge more often (Heavily used ones last under 6 months sometimes).
Where's the problem?
Pure 2D, sure. But ATI's Video/DVD playback is superior to Matrox's.
He never indicated which looked better, all he said was that ATI was faster in ARB2 mode, which may or may not be due to the differences in precision. Every review I've read indicates that ATI has either a slight or a major advantage in visual quality, depending on settings (ATI aquires a much bigger lead in quality as the settings are lowered.) and that ATI aquired a lead in speed as quality settings go up. Notably, the Radeon 9700 Pro also looks as good at 6x AA as the NV30 does at 8x AA.