I'd mod myself up to get this read, but oh well....
This computer cretin was simply out of place while making this review, so bear it no weight. In the following blocks, I provide sufficient information to prove that the "tester's," Mr. Charles White's, review neglects important information, is not thoughtfully written, and is irresponsible.
First, notice the title in the article. It is definitely biased based on his word choice. He is obviously a pro-pc "I hate mac" person considering all the time he spends describing the PC. Ars Technica does a much better job at keeping tests objective and posting all tests completed. The tester probably left out a few tests for the sake of his article, adding to his irresponsibility.
Major errors in this article, including, but not limited to....
1. On page four, he indicates that the graphics card was a newer ATI Fire card (a back of the pack pro graphics card, NOT a consumer one as he claims. The same NVIDIA card in the apple can be put into the pc, but was not. Dell gives buyers several options, and he could have picked the same card for both.), and the mac had a consumer grade NVIDIA whatever Ti with 128 VRAM.
2. The Apple hard drive the tester used has only 2MB of onboard cache, while (rather cutely) the hard drive tester substituted for the PC has 8MB onboard cache.
3. Tester talks about hyper-threading. He obviously has not read the documentation Intel provides, as I have, because he mentions: Without boring you to tears, I?ll tell you that hyperthreading is a new technology from Intel that makes one processor act like two. It doesn?t double the speed of a processor, but makes it able to do most operations faster, and is particularly effective if you?re doing more than one thing at a time with your computer (multitasking).
No, he is incorrect. Hyperthreading on average makes the processor 30% more efficient on a Xeon processor. That percentage drops a lot when one adds as many pipeline stages as the P4. I would estimate that he got less than 10% in performance gains with his hyperthreading in a P4.
Intel does not provide lots of Hyper-threading on a P4, not because of patent issues, as the reviewer claims, but because it is simply inefficient. His own two tests with other computers and with the Dell 350, hyperthreading off, make that clearly evident. Intel itself would rather have someone buy Xeon processors, for they are much more efficient.
4. He claims a bunch of other nonsense about how certain hardware (RAM, Logic board throughput at the processor bridge) makes the PC faster, which is not the case. In fact, much of what he talks about is totally unrelated to the specifics of his tests.
5. Several of his tests rely more on the graphics card and less on the processor. That skews results massively since tester uses a Fire-class card. He should have gone with a 3DLabs wildcat 4 if he really wanted to differentiate the scores.
6. Again, vector operations being performed in all these tests are not the same as floating point operations. Few of his tests used the floating-point abilities of AltiVec. The tester is a "hardware kiddie" if such a thing does exist, and there is a difference between a processor and a graphics card.
7. Many of the tests he posted were tailored for the PC. The tester probably did other ones, but the Mac must have done a decent job on those. How about opening (oops, 8MB hard drive cache), a 150MB Photoshop file in 2400dpi resolution. That file must contain anti-aliased text and a few high-resolution photos.
Finally, I would say from my experience at building workstation hardware and writing reviews for other hardware, that Mr. Charlie White has extremely limited knowledge, provides much "bs" to fill the article, and that he is unqualified for making his review. The site he posted on was digitalvideoediting.com. It is out of the scope of his review to even touch on Photoshop, other 2D, or non-digital video sources. Mr. White has neither the knowledge, expertise- check his credentials on the primary source article -nor the objectivity to make this review. His article is simply irresponsible journalism.
Darwin is actually what Mac OS X users to do its dirty work. Darwin is the collective name of the Mach-O kernel and BSD4.4.
The kernel controls everything and the bsd layer is essential for software development. Without the BSD layer, the mac could not compile regular unix software or compile any software made in project builder.
What you refer to as "Mac OS X" is actually the quartz rendering layer and an application called the finder.
The point is that Darwin and Quartz make an incredible combination, making application development really nice. Someone could add a library that did the same work as Quartz's, but there's absolutely nothing that can compete with Quartz's rendering capabilities.
There's no comperable product on the Windows or the UNIX/Linux side, but anything built on a plain-old darwin system can have a regular kde/windowmaker/gtk/etc. with standard xfree86 libraries and headers.
Apple's new X11 server can replace the stardard Aqua window manager, if you know how. If you don't know how, you have no business even touching that functionality.
Another point: darwin can be run in its purest, UNIX form with xfree86. Startup will display the standard logging that anyone would see in a Linux system instead of the Apple logo. This can be done even if Mac OS X is installed, if you know how. Again, if you don't know how, you probably have no business complaining about Mac OS X.
Darwin w/ KDE can, and has been done successfully, on many systems, including my system. However, if one has the hardware to use Mac OS X and all its assorted components, what is the point of using software than isn't nearly as nice as Mac OS X?
First of all, I'd like to say how much I love your idea for creating a cirriculum for budding geeks.
Speaking from experience, it is extremely difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating to learn about *nix alone, and a mentor-like system would help kids greatly.
Here are some of the things I wished I knew before I bought books at Barnes and Noble:
What technologies Unix has, what they do, what they are used for, and why they should be used. Talk about languages like Perl, PHP, and whatever else to give the kids a roadmap. I had no roadmap, and I ended up buying an ASP book because I wanted to learn web programming. -_- I was young, naive, and unable to return the book in time to get a refund. It did burn brightly, though.
Go through the compile process and explain dependencies and things like that. Before I got my first Unix machine, I had used classic mac os and I knew nothing of the 10000000000000000 extra libraries and such I had to install to get the gimp working. On that thought, talk about package managment systems- the where, why, and how.
Talk about geek culture. Where did open source start? Larry Wall's Camel Book has a rather good chapter about perl culture, and much of it can be applied to more than one place. Mention slashdot, and tell them to read often;)
Talk terminals. Please! Get students familiar with the command line, insert a few *modifications* into a configure script to aquaint people with the compiler, linker *gasp*, and the shell environments. Teach kids what LDFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, etc. they can tweak to get code running on their machine. Also, cvs is really useful, so please teach kids how to use and navigate that! The first initial hump in cvs learning can be hard to get over, and I would definately have liked it if I could have had some direction.
Literature. Teach kids how to buy computer books, how to read computer books, and how to amass a library of computer books. Personally, I cannot stand reading text from a computer screen as it hurts my eyes, so don't limit offerings to online documentation.
After all this fundimental knowledge is gained, talk about how to compile a linux (or other) kernel, installing an operating system (i.e. not redhat; installations that use a simple text-based interface, as if some geek threw a linux distro together together that afternoon:)
I attended java programming classes at my local community college, which were a big waste of time. The lesson is to teach kids how to have some self-direction, so that when they grow up they can be autonomous learners. I had to learn my lessons the hard ways, so I'm glad someone is making an effort to reach out and help students.
I was able to cause a great kernel panic with 10.1, and reproduce it all the time. I'm not sure if it still works, but if one took Netscape 4.7 in classic and went to http://localhost/, assuming an apache web server were running, there was an instant kernel panic.
I sent an email to Apple awhile back, so it may be fixed; however, I have not tested this bug recently, as I cannot stand opening Classic anymore T.t
I remember all the good old days when irc chat was not contorted to be used by retards. I happen to be 17 years old and I am, literally, responsible for creating some of the terms kids use today. It is a perversion of the original idea we online gaming people had- using irc language in common speech.
Bottom line is kids developed this language by themselves, for themselves. Using this language is a means to communicate personability to people whom one cannot see up front. In an anonymous, online environment, being capable of CLEARLY communication emotion is important since kids do not (normally) develop the emotional/judgment center of their brains until ages 18-19. This study can be found somewhere on the Harvard website. Development of this language (including faces) was strictly to reduce the ambiguity associated with Internet chat.
One side note- MacAddict recently published an email in their published magazine saying something like, "OR IM GONNA HAV 2 CUM OVER THERE AND GET U!" along with various other rants. Do you adults have any idea what "CUM" refers to?!?! my god!!!!
Ahhhhhhhhh, I nearly had a heart attack and almost canceled my subscription. The term is incredibly vulgar and is only used as scatological humor. sheesh. The lesson is this: many kids (and others) start to speak this language without understanding its purpose and meaning. Everyone wants to speak like all the "gosu," cool, blah blah starcraft players to fit in. It's a shame peer pressure extends even through the online world.
Mr. Kiwi
"Rec means sh!t, but that doesn't mean you have to like losing."
I have a hard time explaining this to non-computer people.
The CD is not the property, the music on the cd is the property, same as Blizzard makes you buy not the CD for its games, but the CD key required to make the game a lot better.
My broodwar CD became scratched awhile back and i emailed a blizzard person about it. He told me i could go to any retail store that sold broodwar and get a brand spankin' new CD *Free*.
The most interesting observation i made was the fact that while my "peon" was calling his manager to verify my claim, the top tech guy at that CompUSA was trying to tell the manager that the cd thing was ok.
Manager says, "Well I wish i could go to stores and get new cds." A. He doesn't understand intellectual property rights the same as the managers in the music industry don't understand them.
I did get a new Starcraft and Broodwar CD before i left.;D
I had to dl the dist. source and erase my gnu-darwin partition 6-7 times before i finally got everything working on my mac:D I consider it my project for this summer. my god i feel so nerdy.....
Slashdot Mirror
IBM must be using really small fonts to make it hard for SCO to find evidence. It's always the fine print that gets people, though. ;)
I'm glad that Ben and Ben (and if you're in the Fink project, Ben and Ben and Ben and Ben) have finally succeeded with their port. Good job Bens!
The poster had all those specs (previously mentioned) plus 4 ultra320 SCSI Drives in hardware RAID 5 config ^^
I may love my computer even more than he does his!
Anybody have a G5 that can beat both of us?
Take of the "M" in Million and insert a "B".
:P"
That leaves only a few tech people crazy enough to try...
Larry Ellison
Bill Gates
Hmmm, I think we found a new hobby for Larry and Bill- something more constructive than "MY software is BETTER than YOURS!!
I'd mod myself up to get this read, but oh well....
This computer cretin was simply out of place while making this review, so bear it no weight. In the following blocks, I provide sufficient information to prove that the "tester's," Mr. Charles White's, review neglects important information, is not thoughtfully written, and is irresponsible.
First, notice the title in the article. It is definitely biased based on his word choice. He is obviously a pro-pc "I hate mac" person considering all the time he spends describing the PC. Ars Technica does a much better job at keeping tests objective and posting all tests completed. The tester probably left out a few tests for the sake of his article, adding to his irresponsibility.
Major errors in this article, including, but not limited to....
1. On page four, he indicates that the graphics card was a newer ATI Fire card (a back of the pack pro graphics card, NOT a consumer one as he claims. The same NVIDIA card in the apple can be put into the pc, but was not. Dell gives buyers several options, and he could have picked the same card for both.), and the mac had a consumer grade NVIDIA whatever Ti with 128 VRAM.
2. The Apple hard drive the tester used has only 2MB of onboard cache, while (rather cutely) the hard drive tester substituted for the PC has 8MB onboard cache.
3. Tester talks about hyper-threading. He obviously has not read the documentation Intel provides, as I have, because he mentions:
Without boring you to tears, I?ll tell you that hyperthreading is a new technology from Intel that makes one processor act like two. It doesn?t double the speed of a processor, but makes it able to do most operations faster, and is particularly effective if you?re doing more than one thing at a time with your computer (multitasking).
No, he is incorrect. Hyperthreading on average makes the processor 30% more efficient on a Xeon processor. That percentage drops a lot when one adds as many pipeline stages as the P4. I would estimate that he got less than 10% in performance gains with his hyperthreading in a P4.
Intel does not provide lots of Hyper-threading on a P4, not because of patent issues, as the reviewer claims, but because it is simply inefficient. His own two tests with other computers and with the Dell 350, hyperthreading off, make that clearly evident. Intel itself would rather have someone buy Xeon processors, for they are much more efficient.
4. He claims a bunch of other nonsense about how certain hardware (RAM, Logic board throughput at the processor bridge) makes the PC faster, which is not the case. In fact, much of what he talks about is totally unrelated to the specifics of his tests.
5. Several of his tests rely more on the graphics card and less on the processor. That skews results massively since tester uses a Fire-class card. He should have gone with a 3DLabs wildcat 4 if he really wanted to differentiate the scores.
6. Again, vector operations being performed in all these tests are not the same as floating point operations. Few of his tests used the floating-point abilities of AltiVec. The tester is a "hardware kiddie" if such a thing does exist, and there is a difference between a processor and a graphics card.
7. Many of the tests he posted were tailored for the PC. The tester probably did other ones, but the Mac must have done a decent job on those. How about opening (oops, 8MB hard drive cache), a 150MB Photoshop file in 2400dpi resolution. That file must contain anti-aliased text and a few high-resolution photos.
Finally, I would say from my experience at building workstation hardware and writing reviews for other hardware, that Mr. Charlie White has extremely limited knowledge, provides much "bs" to fill the article, and that he is unqualified for making his review. The site he posted on was digitalvideoediting.com. It is out of the scope of his review to even touch on Photoshop, other 2D, or non-digital video sources. Mr. White has neither the knowledge, expertise- check his credentials on the primary source article -nor the objectivity to make this review. His article is simply irresponsible journalism.
Darwin is actually what Mac OS X users to do its dirty work. Darwin is the collective name of the Mach-O kernel and BSD4.4.
The kernel controls everything and the bsd layer is essential for software development. Without the BSD layer, the mac could not compile regular unix software or compile any software made in project builder.
What you refer to as "Mac OS X" is actually the quartz rendering layer and an application called the finder.
The point is that Darwin and Quartz make an incredible combination, making application development really nice. Someone could add a library that did the same work as Quartz's, but there's absolutely nothing that can compete with Quartz's rendering capabilities.
There's no comperable product on the Windows or the UNIX/Linux side, but anything built on a plain-old darwin system can have a regular kde/windowmaker/gtk/etc. with standard xfree86 libraries and headers.
Apple's new X11 server can replace the stardard Aqua window manager, if you know how. If you don't know how, you have no business even touching that functionality.
Another point: darwin can be run in its purest, UNIX form with xfree86. Startup will display the standard logging that anyone would see in a Linux system instead of the Apple logo. This can be done even if Mac OS X is installed, if you know how. Again, if you don't know how, you probably have no business complaining about Mac OS X.
Darwin w/ KDE can, and has been done successfully, on many systems, including my system. However, if one has the hardware to use Mac OS X and all its assorted components, what is the point of using software than isn't nearly as nice as Mac OS X?
Did all of you see what it did to the screen?! Whoa, that has to be the best case mod ever!!!
First of all, I'd like to say how much I love your idea for creating a cirriculum for budding geeks.
;)
:)
Speaking from experience, it is extremely difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating to learn about *nix alone, and a mentor-like system would help kids greatly.
Here are some of the things I wished I knew before I bought books at Barnes and Noble:
What technologies Unix has, what they do, what they are used for, and why they should be used. Talk about languages like Perl, PHP, and whatever else to give the kids a roadmap. I had no roadmap, and I ended up buying an ASP book because I wanted to learn web programming. -_- I was young, naive, and unable to return the book in time to get a refund. It did burn brightly, though.
Go through the compile process and explain dependencies and things like that. Before I got my first Unix machine, I had used classic mac os and I knew nothing of the 10000000000000000 extra libraries and such I had to install to get the gimp working. On that thought, talk about package managment systems- the where, why, and how.
Talk about geek culture. Where did open source start? Larry Wall's Camel Book has a rather good chapter about perl culture, and much of it can be applied to more than one place. Mention slashdot, and tell them to read often
Talk terminals. Please! Get students familiar with the command line, insert a few *modifications* into a configure script to aquaint people with the compiler, linker *gasp*, and the shell environments. Teach kids what LDFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, etc. they can tweak to get code running on their machine. Also, cvs is really useful, so please teach kids how to use and navigate that! The first initial hump in cvs learning can be hard to get over, and I would definately have liked it if I could have had some direction.
Literature. Teach kids how to buy computer books, how to read computer books, and how to amass a library of computer books. Personally, I cannot stand reading text from a computer screen as it hurts my eyes, so don't limit offerings to online documentation.
After all this fundimental knowledge is gained, talk about how to compile a linux (or other) kernel, installing an operating system (i.e. not redhat; installations that use a simple text-based interface, as if some geek threw a linux distro together together that afternoon
I attended java programming classes at my local community college, which were a big waste of time. The lesson is to teach kids how to have some self-direction, so that when they grow up they can be autonomous learners. I had to learn my lessons the hard ways, so I'm glad someone is making an effort to reach out and help students.
I was able to cause a great kernel panic with 10.1, and reproduce it all the time. I'm not sure if it still works, but if one took Netscape 4.7 in classic and went to http://localhost/, assuming an apache web server were running, there was an instant kernel panic.
I sent an email to Apple awhile back, so it may be fixed; however, I have not tested this bug recently, as I cannot stand opening Classic anymore T.t
I remember all the good old days when irc chat was not contorted to be used by retards. I happen to be 17 years old and I am, literally, responsible for creating some of the terms kids use today. It is a perversion of the original idea we online gaming people had- using irc language in common speech. Bottom line is kids developed this language by themselves, for themselves. Using this language is a means to communicate personability to people whom one cannot see up front. In an anonymous, online environment, being capable of CLEARLY communication emotion is important since kids do not (normally) develop the emotional/judgment center of their brains until ages 18-19. This study can be found somewhere on the Harvard website. Development of this language (including faces) was strictly to reduce the ambiguity associated with Internet chat. One side note- MacAddict recently published an email in their published magazine saying something like, "OR IM GONNA HAV 2 CUM OVER THERE AND GET U!" along with various other rants. Do you adults have any idea what "CUM" refers to?!?! my god!!!! Ahhhhhhhhh, I nearly had a heart attack and almost canceled my subscription. The term is incredibly vulgar and is only used as scatological humor. sheesh. The lesson is this: many kids (and others) start to speak this language without understanding its purpose and meaning. Everyone wants to speak like all the "gosu," cool, blah blah starcraft players to fit in. It's a shame peer pressure extends even through the online world. Mr. Kiwi "Rec means sh!t, but that doesn't mean you have to like losing."
I thought it might be nice for everyone to post their images on the web, I'd be interested to see what people put on their startup screens ;D
http://homepage.mac.com/mkiwi/my-boot-image.jpg
now i have a reason to restart my computer!
I have a hard time explaining this to non-computer people. ;D
The CD is not the property, the music on the cd is the property, same as Blizzard makes you buy not the CD for its games, but the CD key required to make the game a lot better.
My broodwar CD became scratched awhile back and i emailed a blizzard person about it. He told me i could go to any retail store that sold broodwar and get a brand spankin' new CD *Free*.
The most interesting observation i made was the fact that while my "peon" was calling his manager to verify my claim, the top tech guy at that CompUSA was trying to tell the manager that the cd thing was ok.
Manager says, "Well I wish i could go to stores and get new cds." A. He doesn't understand intellectual property rights the same as the managers in the music industry don't understand them.
I did get a new Starcraft and Broodwar CD before i left.
I had to dl the dist. source and erase my gnu-darwin partition 6-7 times before i finally got everything working on my mac :D I consider it my project for this summer. my god i feel so nerdy.....