The war in Iraq is about WMD.
The war in Iraq is a part of the global war against terror, it was never about WMD.
The war in Iraq is about liberating its people, it is about democracy and nothing to do with terrorism.
Actually that's a good example of a shallow understanding of a historical event, a politically biased statement. In other words something that would be worthy of an edit on the Wiki, and invariably such edits would be labeled as politically biased by those of the opposite political bias who preferred the original politically biased text. In reality the War in Iraq was about all of the above and more. The "WMD" angle was merely what was used to sell the war to the UN. That was an intense high profile effort and it's natural for people to focus on this one motivation even when they have no political bias. However when honest unbiased historian sit down some day to write the history of war the motivations will be far more complex.
A reader mod system will not prevent bias in the original article or its edits. Hasn't slashdot proven this already? You really need an expert peer review system to improve accuracy and that seems contrary to Wiki's role.
This demonstrates a major fallacy. Borders exists and journalists are subject to them whether the like it or not. Journalists operate in an idealized environment where they are free to investigate and advocate as they care to only when the local government *gives* them the right to do so.
The pen is mightier than the sword only when those wielding the sword allows it to be.
Yahoo! says it simply responds to requests from the authorities and was just complying to local laws.
And they have no option in this matter. The decision is not do we comply with the local law or not, the decision is do we do business in China or not. Anyone who decides to do business in China will be subject to such laws.
I'd wager that most of the posters flaming Yahoo are hypocrites. They babble about how Yahoo should stand up but they fail to realize that they also fail to stand up. When they go shopping do they look at where something is made? Do they buy the $3 screwdriver made in China or the $6 screwdriver made somewhere else when they need to screw together their homebrew 64-bit Athlon Linux box. Yahoo can not change the Chinese government, western consumer might be able to.
Michael Dell wanted Steve Jobs to haave Apple fold their tents and give the money back to their shareholders.
Good call......
Actually at the time it was. Apple's current success has far more to do with iPods than their computers. Apple's future may have more to do with iPods and turning their computers into digital appliances than with computers themselves. I'm thrilled to see Apple move to Intel, but it is really mostly hype. The performance difference between x86 and PowerPC was irrlelevant to most of the population. Today's computers are way overpowered for most users, whether your G4 accomplishes typical tasks at 50% utilization or your P4 accomplishes tasks at 10% utilization is irrelevant, it's nerd trivia. The reason to buy a Mac over a PC is not the CPU, it's Mac OS X and it's user experience, and that is the same last year with PowerPC and this year with x86.
Yes, but Microsoft has since learnt how to use casual piracy as a marketing tool. Letting people copy their software is an investment in the future for them.
Not really, that's more of an operating system tactic, Bill was selling BASIC at the time. The lesson Bill learned was to charge per CPU shipped, first by getting into Apple and Commodore ROMs, and eventually leading to the infamous "Microsoft tax" on PCs that leave the factory. Thank the casual pirates for that.
The comment you initially replied to said:
"And remember, it's the HOBBYISTS who've done more to advance computing than anything Microsoft has done to advance the state of software development in the world."
No, the comment I replied to and quoted in my reply said:
"And remember, it's the HOBBYISTS who've done more to advance computing than anything Microsoft has done to advance the state of software development in the world. (Linus Torvalds anyone?)"
Note the last three words in the parenthesis.;-)
So even if you give FreeBSD almost all of the OS "innovation" (which is just as absurd as giving it none)... it is still firmly in the Hobbyist camp.
I didn't give FreeBSD any such credit, are you responding to the correct post? I gave the credit to AT&T: "AT&T advanced computing by developing Unix. I'm open to the idea of giving UC Berekeley some credit too, but we have the reimplementation issue as well." AT&T is commercial. UC Berkeley is academic. Hobbyists came much later.
Except for the fact that Linux has acted as a testbed for new scheduling algorithms, new virtual memory algorithms, new interrupt handling routines, etc. Without Linux these projects might have been conducted in an ivory tower demo OS or something else with little impact on the real world and no feedback on how they ACTUALLY perform. Linux through its open source nature has fostered a real world petri dish that wouldn't have existed otherwise and therefore has advanced the art of computer science.
You seem to ignore the fact that FreeBSD was also available to the PC masses, with source code for the hobbyists to tinker with. It was no ivory tower demo. FreeBSD was used to host major sites long before Linux was ready for such duties, many a Linux distribution was downloaded from a site hosted by FreeBSD. To use your analogy, there was more than one Petri dish. Again, Linux is an outstanding achievement, but original, first, or irreplacable it is not. Irreplacable in a technical sense, certainly not in a political sense.
He may not have created any new technologies, but I'd content that he did advance computing by putting a free Unix-like system into the hands of hundreds of millions of people worldwide who likely would not be able to afford a Unix license.
I'd say that is a red herring of sorts since UC Berkeley was already offering free source code. FreeBSD was also bringing Unix to the masses with PCs. Again, I don't want to minimize the tremendous efforts that have gone into Linux, but Linux's advancements were mostly in the area of on-line distribution.
Who, exactly, is the little guy? I'll give him $100. But seriously, who in the software business isn't a large corporation? The Open Source movement? They're giving people the code - not exactly a target for piracy...
You mention two extremes, the mega corporation and open source. The little guy is in the middle. He's the guy that ends up working for the former and sometimes donating to the latter, rather than having his own small company. Gates claimed 90% piracy, lets dial that back to 50%. Do you think there is a shortage of failed small software companies where a doubling of sales could have made the difference between success and failure? What if Gates was accurate and sales would have been ten fold? Piracy greatly increases the cost and risk of entering the software business.
And remember, it's the HOBBYISTS who've done more to advance computing than anything Microsoft has done to advance the state of software development in the world. (Linus Torvalds anyone?)
Linux didn't really advance computing, Linux is yet another reimplementation of Unix. AT&T advanced computing by developing Unix. I'm open to the idea of giving UC Berekeley some credit too, but we have the reimplementation issue as well. However Berkeley does deserve credit for it's open license, Linux's GPL license being a reimplementation of the the open distribution idea. Please don't misunderstand, I am not slamming Linux or minimizing the enormous efforts that went into it's development. Linux is an outstanding technical achievement, but it does not offer original ideas, it merely offers original source code.
"The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written."
And for those of you that hate reading the word of Gates, I'll paraphrase the above for you in fewer words:
Actually a better introduction would be: "for those of you that do not see the things I am imagining, I'll distort the above for you."
Remember, don't you dare try to write your own software. Leave that to me. Then buy it from me...
He does not write that. He is complaining about the widespread use of pirated software, an entirely legitimate complaint. If it is OK to violate his copyright and his license, wouldn't it also be OK to violate the copyright and license of authors who choose to release software under the GPL?
... Any resistance to this shows that you are ruining the software industry as we know it. If we fool everyone into thinking they need to pay us money for software, then we can rape the world, are you blind?
Software piracy does hurt the software industry. Products and technologies fail not due to technical shortcomings but rather the shallow pockets of the developers. Piracy destroys the little guy, not the guy with the deep pockets like Bill Gates.
A recent PBS series, "The War That Made America" ?, mentioned Amherst's attempts at biological warfare. However they pointed out that it was most likely inconsequential since smallpox was already ravaging the tribes. This does not make Amherst any less of a criminal.
"Capitalism also brings you your computer, the internet, the clothes you are wearing, or at least I hope you are wearing as you read this,..."
[snip]
Actually, he's wrong. Capitalism is a political system.
No, capitalism is an economic system. Whoever is teaching you politics is either (a) a fool or (b) wise and in the business of manipulating fools.
capitalism
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=capitalis m
What brings us the TV, computer, car and the clothes is the industry.
And the industries bringing those goods are based upon capitalist economic systems.
What Capitalism brings us is an excuse for criminals to gain power.
You do realize that the far left lies just like the far left?
Which is exactly why I brought up the point of Google. They host information on Google.com that is censored in China and it is accessible in China.
Google unrealistically expects that the Chinese government won't notice and get back to them about that?
Microsoft realistically expects that the Chinese government is too smart to let that get by for long so they are implementing a solution with greater viability?
Exactly my thought. However, I'm wondering how they could imitate this kind of situation. Afterall there's no chance they'll kill some animal in some cold place and put one of their interns in it over night. That would be pretty cruel taking into account that it's just done "to be sure"...
My understanding is that Buffalo were shot and gutted as emergency shelters in pioneering days, a bio lean-to, but maybe that's urban, uh no, non-urban myth. Further, that was to get out of the wind and rain, which seems quite plausible, not to get at a blanket of guts which seems to contradict the general survival rule of don't get wet.
As far as getting a Buffalo carcass, that may actually be easily. Some Buffalo are raised and harvested as meat on private ranches. Catalina Island for example, not far from the Los Angeles area, offers Buffalo burgers at some of the local shops.
At last years game developer conference both Intel and AMD were saying that games should go multithreaded, that future CPU performance improvements were largely going to come from multiple cores not clock rate. Intel and AMD were both demonstrating current games taking advantage of threading. I forget what the game was but one racing game uses a second thread for optional effects. When running a single thread you get a small amount of dust, smoke, flames, etc. However when running with multiple threads the particle system will use HT or DC to generate additional effects, more/better smoke, dust, etc. The game makes the decision to go single or multi after evaluating the CPU.
It's generally been true for Intel vs. PPC comparisons for nearly ten years. And yes I am also discussing the P4, it appeared in many of Job's stage demonstrations, and historically it generally beat it's contemporary PPCs when the artificial technical constraint of matching clockrates was lifeted.
ts been true since the Athlon/Pentium III days. Before that there were no benchmarks on the Power PC at all (you're not going to bring up ByteMark are you?), and thus you have no basis at all to make such a claim.
I did try ByteMark when Apple used it as a basis for it's claims, as I did with their other basis during other advertising campaigns over the years. When x86 ByteMark was compiled with a current compiler with appropriate settings the PowerPC improvements were far less dramatic than when Apple used an old 486 optimized version on a Pentium against a current PowerPC build. Similar story when Apple used old MMX code on an Intel CPU with SSE against a current PowerPC build using Altivec. Similar story when Apple used an inferior compiler for Intel spec scores, rather than official spec scores. In addition to these synthetic benchmarks, I develop for both PC and Mac. Historically Apple's claims over the years have been marketing exaggerations, PowerPC turned out to only be slightly faster in technical comparisons but an overall loser in general real world comparisons. You are mistaken regarding P3s and early Athlons. Are you playing games on the Athlon side where you use the actual clockrate rather than what AMD claims is the equivalent and uses on their product packaging and literature? Also, cherry picking the more recent models and fixating on these does not change the validity of nearly ten years of history.
This is actually *NOT TRUE*, and your repetition of it is testimony to the effectiveness of Jobs' reality distortion field.
Or perhaps you are having trouble with the word "generally" and didn't catch the clue that "Same story, year after year after year" indicates I am not discussing only the latest and greatest CPUs. I'm actually going back all the way to 603/604 days. Anyway, thanks for the laugh. I'm usually getting flamed by the RDF'd Mac advocates for spreading the heresy that PowerMac are only marginally faster than PC under somewhat contrived scenarios, it's quite amusing to now be labeled an RDF'd Mac advocate for having the exact same position.
I have an P4 3.2, a P-M 1.6, and an Athlon 3200+. I am quite familiar with how PC's generally stack up to recent Macs.
Slashdot Mirror
"The "WMD" angle was merely what was used to sell the war to the UN."
That would possibly be a reasonable excuse if it hadn't also been false, and deliberately embellished.
It was not known to be false until there were boots on the ground.
The war in Iraq is about WMD.
The war in Iraq is a part of the global war against terror, it was never about WMD.
The war in Iraq is about liberating its people, it is about democracy and nothing to do with terrorism.
Actually that's a good example of a shallow understanding of a historical event, a politically biased statement. In other words something that would be worthy of an edit on the Wiki, and invariably such edits would be labeled as politically biased by those of the opposite political bias who preferred the original politically biased text. In reality the War in Iraq was about all of the above and more. The "WMD" angle was merely what was used to sell the war to the UN. That was an intense high profile effort and it's natural for people to focus on this one motivation even when they have no political bias. However when honest unbiased historian sit down some day to write the history of war the motivations will be far more complex.
A reader mod system will not prevent bias in the original article or its edits. Hasn't slashdot proven this already? You really need an expert peer review system to improve accuracy and that seems contrary to Wiki's role.
A Reporters Without Borders post
This demonstrates a major fallacy. Borders exists and journalists are subject to them whether the like it or not. Journalists operate in an idealized environment where they are free to investigate and advocate as they care to only when the local government *gives* them the right to do so.
The pen is mightier than the sword only when those wielding the sword allows it to be.
Yahoo! says it simply responds to requests from the authorities and was just complying to local laws.
And they have no option in this matter. The decision is not do we comply with the local law or not, the decision is do we do business in China or not. Anyone who decides to do business in China will be subject to such laws.
I'd wager that most of the posters flaming Yahoo are hypocrites. They babble about how Yahoo should stand up but they fail to realize that they also fail to stand up. When they go shopping do they look at where something is made? Do they buy the $3 screwdriver made in China or the $6 screwdriver made somewhere else when they need to screw together their homebrew 64-bit Athlon Linux box. Yahoo can not change the Chinese government, western consumer might be able to.
Michael Dell wanted Steve Jobs to haave Apple fold their tents and give the money back to their shareholders. Good call......
Actually at the time it was. Apple's current success has far more to do with iPods than their computers. Apple's future may have more to do with iPods and turning their computers into digital appliances than with computers themselves. I'm thrilled to see Apple move to Intel, but it is really mostly hype. The performance difference between x86 and PowerPC was irrlelevant to most of the population. Today's computers are way overpowered for most users, whether your G4 accomplishes typical tasks at 50% utilization or your P4 accomplishes tasks at 10% utilization is irrelevant, it's nerd trivia. The reason to buy a Mac over a PC is not the CPU, it's Mac OS X and it's user experience, and that is the same last year with PowerPC and this year with x86.
dumbass.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Yes, but Microsoft has since learnt how to use casual piracy as a marketing tool. Letting people copy their software is an investment in the future for them.
Not really, that's more of an operating system tactic, Bill was selling BASIC at the time. The lesson Bill learned was to charge per CPU shipped, first by getting into Apple and Commodore ROMs, and eventually leading to the infamous "Microsoft tax" on PCs that leave the factory. Thank the casual pirates for that.
Academics are compensated, money, degree, etc. Academics are sometimes assigned or otherwise "coerced" to work on a project.
The comment you initially replied to said: "And remember, it's the HOBBYISTS who've done more to advance computing than anything Microsoft has done to advance the state of software development in the world."
;-)
... it is still firmly in the Hobbyist camp.
No, the comment I replied to and quoted in my reply said: "And remember, it's the HOBBYISTS who've done more to advance computing than anything Microsoft has done to advance the state of software development in the world. (Linus Torvalds anyone?)"
Note the last three words in the parenthesis.
So even if you give FreeBSD almost all of the OS "innovation" (which is just as absurd as giving it none)
I didn't give FreeBSD any such credit, are you responding to the correct post? I gave the credit to AT&T: "AT&T advanced computing by developing Unix. I'm open to the idea of giving UC Berekeley some credit too, but we have the reimplementation issue as well." AT&T is commercial. UC Berkeley is academic. Hobbyists came much later.
Except for the fact that Linux has acted as a testbed for new scheduling algorithms, new virtual memory algorithms, new interrupt handling routines, etc. Without Linux these projects might have been conducted in an ivory tower demo OS or something else with little impact on the real world and no feedback on how they ACTUALLY perform. Linux through its open source nature has fostered a real world petri dish that wouldn't have existed otherwise and therefore has advanced the art of computer science.
You seem to ignore the fact that FreeBSD was also available to the PC masses, with source code for the hobbyists to tinker with. It was no ivory tower demo. FreeBSD was used to host major sites long before Linux was ready for such duties, many a Linux distribution was downloaded from a site hosted by FreeBSD. To use your analogy, there was more than one Petri dish. Again, Linux is an outstanding achievement, but original, first, or irreplacable it is not. Irreplacable in a technical sense, certainly not in a political sense.
He may not have created any new technologies, but I'd content that he did advance computing by putting a free Unix-like system into the hands of hundreds of millions of people worldwide who likely would not be able to afford a Unix license.
I'd say that is a red herring of sorts since UC Berkeley was already offering free source code. FreeBSD was also bringing Unix to the masses with PCs. Again, I don't want to minimize the tremendous efforts that have gone into Linux, but Linux's advancements were mostly in the area of on-line distribution.
Who, exactly, is the little guy? I'll give him $100. But seriously, who in the software business isn't a large corporation? The Open Source movement? They're giving people the code - not exactly a target for piracy...
You mention two extremes, the mega corporation and open source. The little guy is in the middle. He's the guy that ends up working for the former and sometimes donating to the latter, rather than having his own small company. Gates claimed 90% piracy, lets dial that back to 50%. Do you think there is a shortage of failed small software companies where a doubling of sales could have made the difference between success and failure? What if Gates was accurate and sales would have been ten fold? Piracy greatly increases the cost and risk of entering the software business.
And remember, it's the HOBBYISTS who've done more to advance computing than anything Microsoft has done to advance the state of software development in the world. (Linus Torvalds anyone?)
Linux didn't really advance computing, Linux is yet another reimplementation of Unix. AT&T advanced computing by developing Unix. I'm open to the idea of giving UC Berekeley some credit too, but we have the reimplementation issue as well. However Berkeley does deserve credit for it's open license, Linux's GPL license being a reimplementation of the the open distribution idea. Please don't misunderstand, I am not slamming Linux or minimizing the enormous efforts that went into it's development. Linux is an outstanding technical achievement, but it does not offer original ideas, it merely offers original source code.
"The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written."
...
... Any resistance to this shows that you are ruining the software industry as we know it. If we fool everyone into thinking they need to pay us money for software, then we can rape the world, are you blind?
And for those of you that hate reading the word of Gates, I'll paraphrase the above for you in fewer words:
Actually a better introduction would be: "for those of you that do not see the things I am imagining, I'll distort the above for you."
Remember, don't you dare try to write your own software. Leave that to me. Then buy it from me
He does not write that. He is complaining about the widespread use of pirated software, an entirely legitimate complaint. If it is OK to violate his copyright and his license, wouldn't it also be OK to violate the copyright and license of authors who choose to release software under the GPL?
Software piracy does hurt the software industry. Products and technologies fail not due to technical shortcomings but rather the shallow pockets of the developers. Piracy destroys the little guy, not the guy with the deep pockets like Bill Gates.
A recent PBS series, "The War That Made America" ?, mentioned Amherst's attempts at biological warfare. However they pointed out that it was most likely inconsequential since smallpox was already ravaging the tribes. This does not make Amherst any less of a criminal.
"Capitalism also brings you your computer, the internet, the clothes you are wearing, or at least I hope you are wearing as you read this, ..."
[snip]
s m
Actually, he's wrong. Capitalism is a political system.
No, capitalism is an economic system. Whoever is teaching you politics is either (a) a fool or (b) wise and in the business of manipulating fools.
capitalism
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=capitali
What brings us the TV, computer, car and the clothes is the industry.
And the industries bringing those goods are based upon capitalist economic systems.
What Capitalism brings us is an excuse for criminals to gain power.
You do realize that the far left lies just like the far left?
Now I'm really confused whom to hate. :-/ Help me?
Most of the hatred of MS is irrational, why introduce rationality now?
Hate capitalism for a change. It's what makes companies like these thrive.
...
Capitalism also brings you your computer, the internet, the clothes you are wearing, or at least I hope you are wearing as you read this,
No government is immune to its own people turning against it.
Saddam's Iraq was. The US was (Civil War). Successful revolutions often have 3rd party support, the US Revolutionary War for example.
Which is exactly why I brought up the point of Google. They host information on Google.com that is censored in China and it is accessible in China.
Google unrealistically expects that the Chinese government won't notice and get back to them about that?
Microsoft realistically expects that the Chinese government is too smart to let that get by for long so they are implementing a solution with greater viability?
Exactly my thought. However, I'm wondering how they could imitate this kind of situation. Afterall there's no chance they'll kill some animal in some cold place and put one of their interns in it over night. That would be pretty cruel taking into account that it's just done "to be sure"...
My understanding is that Buffalo were shot and gutted as emergency shelters in pioneering days, a bio lean-to, but maybe that's urban, uh no, non-urban myth. Further, that was to get out of the wind and rain, which seems quite plausible, not to get at a blanket of guts which seems to contradict the general survival rule of don't get wet.
As far as getting a Buffalo carcass, that may actually be easily. Some Buffalo are raised and harvested as meat on private ranches. Catalina Island for example, not far from the Los Angeles area, offers Buffalo burgers at some of the local shops.
Blizzard North did not do Starcraft, the folks in Southern California did that.
Most games now are still single threaded.
At last years game developer conference both Intel and AMD were saying that games should go multithreaded, that future CPU performance improvements were largely going to come from multiple cores not clock rate. Intel and AMD were both demonstrating current games taking advantage of threading. I forget what the game was but one racing game uses a second thread for optional effects. When running a single thread you get a small amount of dust, smoke, flames, etc. However when running with multiple threads the particle system will use HT or DC to generate additional effects, more/better smoke, dust, etc. The game makes the decision to go single or multi after evaluating the CPU.
It's generally been true for Intel vs. PPC comparisons for nearly ten years. And yes I am also discussing the P4, it appeared in many of Job's stage demonstrations, and historically it generally beat it's contemporary PPCs when the artificial technical constraint of matching clockrates was lifeted.
ts been true since the Athlon/Pentium III days. Before that there were no benchmarks on the Power PC at all (you're not going to bring up ByteMark are you?), and thus you have no basis at all to make such a claim.
I did try ByteMark when Apple used it as a basis for it's claims, as I did with their other basis during other advertising campaigns over the years. When x86 ByteMark was compiled with a current compiler with appropriate settings the PowerPC improvements were far less dramatic than when Apple used an old 486 optimized version on a Pentium against a current PowerPC build. Similar story when Apple used old MMX code on an Intel CPU with SSE against a current PowerPC build using Altivec. Similar story when Apple used an inferior compiler for Intel spec scores, rather than official spec scores. In addition to these synthetic benchmarks, I develop for both PC and Mac. Historically Apple's claims over the years have been marketing exaggerations, PowerPC turned out to only be slightly faster in technical comparisons but an overall loser in general real world comparisons. You are mistaken regarding P3s and early Athlons. Are you playing games on the Athlon side where you use the actual clockrate rather than what AMD claims is the equivalent and uses on their product packaging and literature? Also, cherry picking the more recent models and fixating on these does not change the validity of nearly ten years of history.
This is actually *NOT TRUE*, and your repetition of it is testimony to the effectiveness of Jobs' reality distortion field.
Or perhaps you are having trouble with the word "generally" and didn't catch the clue that "Same story, year after year after year" indicates I am not discussing only the latest and greatest CPUs. I'm actually going back all the way to 603/604 days. Anyway, thanks for the laugh. I'm usually getting flamed by the RDF'd Mac advocates for spreading the heresy that PowerMac are only marginally faster than PC under somewhat contrived scenarios, it's quite amusing to now be labeled an RDF'd Mac advocate for having the exact same position.
I have an P4 3.2, a P-M 1.6, and an Athlon 3200+. I am quite familiar with how PC's generally stack up to recent Macs.