Mine is a Pismo, too, but I should have mentioned that I'm running Ubuntu Dapper, which has some newer bits of X.org than the previous release has. It's very snappy these days.
Really? I have quite the opposite experience. While Ubuntu takes all week to boot, once it's running it feels faster than OS X. Scrolling a web page, for example, seems faster, and I can play larger and more complex videos using VideoLAN under Ubuntu than I can under OS X.
Nevertheless, I still triple-boot that system: Ubuntu for almost everything, OS X when I want to use iTunes, QuickTime, etc, and Mac OS 9 for old games.
The article doesn't seem to mention some other important ways to make your PC sound quieter. One is to simply move it away from the wall. Most PCs have a rear-blowing fan that fires right into a wall, and the sound reflection is quite strong. Moving the PC away from the wall reduces the power of the reflected sound. You can also mount foam on any hard surface behind or beneath the PC if moving it is impractical.
Changing the way your PC is mounted to the floor can also make a big difference. All computer fans vibrate to some degree, and the feet on the PC case transfer this vibration to the floor or cabinet with a sometimes surprising transfer function. Getting softer or harder feet, or even bolting it down to a large heavy object, can quiet this down.
Finally hard disks can be mounted on soft rubber grommets which makes a huge difference in how much sound is transferred from the drive to the case. This can eliminate the subtle but annoying noise generated by disk eccentricity and muffle the sound of the voice coil actuator.
More importanly, you can substitute any other license for "GPL" in the parent post. If you misappropriate software under any license, you could have some liability. Duh.
Yeah actually they are both terrible. XPDF has serious problems with line art and typography, which covers about 95% of what you want out of your PDF files.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply (and your reply to the battery post). As a user who invokes MacOS only rarely, and then only on my Mac mini at home, I don't share most of your conclusions. It's true that MacOS X doesn't officialy support wireless WAN cards, but many of them can be made to work with Linux. And it's also true that SmartCards are more or less useless on Mac OS, but they can be highly integrated with Linux.
I'm not sure what you're getting at regarding the processor throttling. Mac OS will slow down your CPU when you are using the battery, too. At least, it does when set to "Automatic", which is the default. And on the new Macbook, it will even shut off the second CPU.
If I followed the advice of all the apologists who replied to me original post, I'd have a Macbook Pro with a USB CF reader, a USB SmartCard reader, a USB modem, and a USB WAN card. They could rename it the Octopus Book Pro.
The reader you linked doesn't support CompactFlash. A CF card is physically too large to fit in an ExpressCard/34. If there is ever a CF reader for the MacBook, it will necessarily be external. And this is not an optional feature for me, I need a CF reader to get the photos off my camera without waiting a month for them to be transferred over the USB port.
Well, Powerbooks didn't have a [WAN] card to do these, either.
Right, but they had a PC Card slot that supported them.
Again, neither did any Powerbooks [have a SmartCard reader]
Right again, but the PowerBook has a PC Card slot that supports them! And, quite importantly, a SmartCard will actually fit in a PC Card slot.
Ah, right, because your 6-year-old Powerbook G3 ha- a CompactFlash card reader and a SmartCard reader.
Yes, it does. I have PC Cards for those functions. My Pismo has a PC Card slot. Therefore my Pismo can read CF and SmartCards and can use WAN cards from Sprint etc. My Pismo also has a modem and two powered FireWire ports. I do not see why this is hard for you to understand.
That wasn't really my point. I don't think 3-4hrs that recent PowerBooks get is any kind of benchmark. My ancient Pismo can get 4-5 times that runtime from batteries. Now, I appreciate the fact that the Pismo weighs 6.6 pounds, but I think the trade is a good one.
What's great about the MacBook again? It it not compatible with PC Cards, and there are zero available peripherals for its ExpressCard/34 slot. It has no way to read a CompactFlash card except for a USB reader. It has no modem, except for a USB modem. It has no GPRS/EDGE/EVDO/1xRTT wireless WAN card, and no slot for adding one. It has no SmartCard reader. The battery life, although unannounced, is expected to be average.
As far as I can tell, the MacBook lacks any kind of feature that sets it apart, other than running MacOS X. The Acer TravelMate, Ferrari series and the Thinkpad X series seem to be much better computers if you don't need MacOS X.
I'm planning to stay with my 6-year-old PowerBook G3 until Apple releases a computer that's somewhere near as useful.
Eh, "previous powerbooks" like the PowerBook G3 Pismo have battery life approaching 15 hours when equipped with both batteries. And the PowerBook G4 line, while advertised at 4-5 hours, get 3-4 hours in real use.
The article says they stopped measuring at 800AD because the reliable record doesn't go back any further. It specifically DOES NOT SAY that 800AD was as warm as the 20th century.
Ah I see, Craig Newmark is only in it for the money, but Bruce Brugmann just wants to save puppies and help old ladies across the street? Please! Brugmann has lost his mind and the content of the Guardian has decline with him. I think it's swell that Brugmann fought for public power for 30 years (and lost), but you can't point to political fights as evidence that your newspaper is of any use.
As for the rest of your post, shove it up your ass with a hydraulic ram, you fucking fascist cocksocket.
People bitch about craigslist, but in truth it's an awesome display of market-clearing power. In the last two months, I have:
Sold my car on Craigslist, for more than car dealers offered, in cash, in under 4 hours.
Sold a Playstation 2 in under a day.
Sold all the major parts of a broken iBook, including the broken logic board, for more than the total offered by a computer salvage company.
Bought a 6-year-old laptop computer with the exact specifications I wanted, in under two days, for less than the median selling price of the same item on eBay (and of course, no shipping).
I will admit that I get frustrated with the people who call and say they are going to buy the item but then don't, and with the kids who want to buy your Playstation, but don't have any money or transportation and don't even know how to ride the bus, and with the African bank scams that automatically reply to every single listing. But in general it's a fantastic and free method for the buying and selling of anything.
He compares Craigslist to Wal*Mart because he writes for a third-rate free weekly newspaper which depends on small advertisers for revenue. Competition with Craigslist is killing the Guardian because the Guardian provides terrible value to advertisers. They charge a large fee, run your ad only once per week, and on the same page with incoherent political screeds, strange editorials, factually incorrect news pieces, and artistic criticism of the latest pornographic dvds.
Craigslist is killing the Guardian because the Guardian is a bad product. And for the Guardian, Craigslist *is* local competition, and they *do* employ San Francisco workers (4, I think).
No, because you spent a week in the first place trying to get the damn thing built, then you wasted the rest of your life arguing with your "friends" about the beneficial effects of -fomit-frame-pointer during your shifts at the Dairy Queen.
Oprah will believe anything. She exists to frighten stay-at-home midwestern housewives and, simultaneously, sell them a new brand of bleach. If Oprah didn't have her bizarre lies and scaremongering, then the frightened masses would stop watching. As it is, they _have_ to watch, otherwise they might miss the latest news about dangerous shady characters who kidnap little boys from school, mail them to Thailand in small parcels, and sell them into slavery in the broomstick rape industry.
The reason it's still misleading is because applications like iPhoto aren't parallel (although one could imagine a trivial way to parallelize it). For the most part, no applications in common use on MacOS are parallel.
You're right that it will be hard to explain it away if they move from a 4-way Powermac to 2-way with Intel CPUs, especially when you consider that the current Powermac is trouncing the iMac Core Duo in benchmarks, parallel and otherwise.
Er, except Apple is misleading by using SPECint_rate to compare a single-CPU G5 to a dual-CPU Pentium. When a system with double the CPUs is scoring 2-3x better on SPECint_rate, that systems individual CPUs are roughly 1-1.5x faster.
Yeah, I invented a really sweet, tiny DC-DC power supply the other day. It consists entirely of a (patent pending) straight piece of wire*, and it's 99.96% efficient at full power. Isn't that amazing?
* External AC-DC power converter not included.
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Mine is a Pismo, too, but I should have mentioned that I'm running Ubuntu Dapper, which has some newer bits of X.org than the previous release has. It's very snappy these days.
Really? I have quite the opposite experience. While Ubuntu takes all week to boot, once it's running it feels faster than OS X. Scrolling a web page, for example, seems faster, and I can play larger and more complex videos using VideoLAN under Ubuntu than I can under OS X.
Nevertheless, I still triple-boot that system: Ubuntu for almost everything, OS X when I want to use iTunes, QuickTime, etc, and Mac OS 9 for old games.
The article doesn't seem to mention some other important ways to make your PC sound quieter. One is to simply move it away from the wall. Most PCs have a rear-blowing fan that fires right into a wall, and the sound reflection is quite strong. Moving the PC away from the wall reduces the power of the reflected sound. You can also mount foam on any hard surface behind or beneath the PC if moving it is impractical.
Changing the way your PC is mounted to the floor can also make a big difference. All computer fans vibrate to some degree, and the feet on the PC case transfer this vibration to the floor or cabinet with a sometimes surprising transfer function. Getting softer or harder feet, or even bolting it down to a large heavy object, can quiet this down.
Finally hard disks can be mounted on soft rubber grommets which makes a huge difference in how much sound is transferred from the drive to the case. This can eliminate the subtle but annoying noise generated by disk eccentricity and muffle the sound of the voice coil actuator.
More importanly, you can substitute any other license for "GPL" in the parent post. If you misappropriate software under any license, you could have some liability. Duh.
Why do the racks need to be steel for NEBS?
Yeah actually they are both terrible. XPDF has serious problems with line art and typography, which covers about 95% of what you want out of your PDF files.
I'm not sure what you're getting at regarding the processor throttling. Mac OS will slow down your CPU when you are using the battery, too. At least, it does when set to "Automatic", which is the default. And on the new Macbook, it will even shut off the second CPU.
If I followed the advice of all the apologists who replied to me original post, I'd have a Macbook Pro with a USB CF reader, a USB SmartCard reader, a USB modem, and a USB WAN card. They could rename it the Octopus Book Pro.
That wasn't really my point. I don't think 3-4hrs that recent PowerBooks get is any kind of benchmark. My ancient Pismo can get 4-5 times that runtime from batteries. Now, I appreciate the fact that the Pismo weighs 6.6 pounds, but I think the trade is a good one.
It's not an issue for me, since I prefer to run Linux on my laptops, be they shipped with Windows or Mac OS.
What's great about the MacBook again? It it not compatible with PC Cards, and there are zero available peripherals for its ExpressCard/34 slot. It has no way to read a CompactFlash card except for a USB reader. It has no modem, except for a USB modem. It has no GPRS/EDGE/EVDO/1xRTT wireless WAN card, and no slot for adding one. It has no SmartCard reader. The battery life, although unannounced, is expected to be average.
As far as I can tell, the MacBook lacks any kind of feature that sets it apart, other than running MacOS X. The Acer TravelMate, Ferrari series and the Thinkpad X series seem to be much better computers if you don't need MacOS X.
I'm planning to stay with my 6-year-old PowerBook G3 until Apple releases a computer that's somewhere near as useful.
Eh, "previous powerbooks" like the PowerBook G3 Pismo have battery life approaching 15 hours when equipped with both batteries. And the PowerBook G4 line, while advertised at 4-5 hours, get 3-4 hours in real use.
"Artifex33 found to be mindless asshat"
Reads a bit differently, doesn't it?
The article says they stopped measuring at 800AD because the reliable record doesn't go back any further. It specifically DOES NOT SAY that 800AD was as warm as the 20th century.
Actually, what you said is that I'm a moron and a Republican.
Ah I see, Craig Newmark is only in it for the money, but Bruce Brugmann just wants to save puppies and help old ladies across the street? Please! Brugmann has lost his mind and the content of the Guardian has decline with him. I think it's swell that Brugmann fought for public power for 30 years (and lost), but you can't point to political fights as evidence that your newspaper is of any use.
As for the rest of your post, shove it up your ass with a hydraulic ram, you fucking fascist cocksocket.
People bitch about craigslist, but in truth it's an awesome display of market-clearing power. In the last two months, I have:
Sold my car on Craigslist, for more than car dealers offered, in cash, in under 4 hours.
Sold a Playstation 2 in under a day.
Sold all the major parts of a broken iBook, including the broken logic board, for more than the total offered by a computer salvage company.
Bought a 6-year-old laptop computer with the exact specifications I wanted, in under two days, for less than the median selling price of the same item on eBay (and of course, no shipping).
I will admit that I get frustrated with the people who call and say they are going to buy the item but then don't, and with the kids who want to buy your Playstation, but don't have any money or transportation and don't even know how to ride the bus, and with the African bank scams that automatically reply to every single listing. But in general it's a fantastic and free method for the buying and selling of anything.
He compares Craigslist to Wal*Mart because he writes for a third-rate free weekly newspaper which depends on small advertisers for revenue. Competition with Craigslist is killing the Guardian because the Guardian provides terrible value to advertisers. They charge a large fee, run your ad only once per week, and on the same page with incoherent political screeds, strange editorials, factually incorrect news pieces, and artistic criticism of the latest pornographic dvds.
Craigslist is killing the Guardian because the Guardian is a bad product. And for the Guardian, Craigslist *is* local competition, and they *do* employ San Francisco workers (4, I think).
Or it could be that WINE have implemented HeapAlloc etc as just plain old malloc without any ACL checking at all.
No, because you spent a week in the first place trying to get the damn thing built, then you wasted the rest of your life arguing with your "friends" about the beneficial effects of -fomit-frame-pointer during your shifts at the Dairy Queen.
Oprah will believe anything. She exists to frighten stay-at-home midwestern housewives and, simultaneously, sell them a new brand of bleach. If Oprah didn't have her bizarre lies and scaremongering, then the frightened masses would stop watching. As it is, they _have_ to watch, otherwise they might miss the latest news about dangerous shady characters who kidnap little boys from school, mail them to Thailand in small parcels, and sell them into slavery in the broomstick rape industry.
DON'T MISS IT! THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOUR CHILD!
You just spent $750 to $1000 on a 90GB storage subsystem with only 1gb write bandwidth. Do you really think that's such a swell deal?
Well, he _did_ say that he would measure "high i/o rate" using Postmark, so I think the requirement is clearly stated: scores well in Postmark.
Obviously, Postmark is a transaction rate/metadata benchmark.
Strange that you got modded troll...
The reason it's still misleading is because applications like iPhoto aren't parallel (although one could imagine a trivial way to parallelize it). For the most part, no applications in common use on MacOS are parallel.
You're right that it will be hard to explain it away if they move from a 4-way Powermac to 2-way with Intel CPUs, especially when you consider that the current Powermac is trouncing the iMac Core Duo in benchmarks, parallel and otherwise.
Er, except Apple is misleading by using SPECint_rate to compare a single-CPU G5 to a dual-CPU Pentium. When a system with double the CPUs is scoring 2-3x better on SPECint_rate, that systems individual CPUs are roughly 1-1.5x faster.
Yeah, I invented a really sweet, tiny DC-DC power supply the other day. It consists entirely of a (patent pending) straight piece of wire*, and it's 99.96% efficient at full power. Isn't that amazing? * External AC-DC power converter not included.