The Clever Shark

More bits of info about SCUM’s wild Linux claims. Who put LSD in Santa Cruz’s water supply???

Dumbass clerk armed with Excel costs firm $24M. Cut-and-paste your way to the poorhouse!

Iraq’s wackiest home videos. For those looking for the ‘other side’ of Saddam.

French court stops embarassing book on corruption. O.J. now said to be going to French court to stop the publication of his search for his wife’s ‘real killers’ on the golf courses of America.

US Senator wants to give the RIAA the right to destroy your PC. The asshole should lay off the crack pipe and take a valium already.

NYC to residents: snitch on your neighbors! As if the Big Apple didn’t have enough rats already…

Microsoft: XP, P4 combination can lead to ‘degradation’. Now, how long have they been denying that this would happen?

Nokia VP: lawyers should be culled like rabbits! First Shakespeare, now Andersen. That being said, his take on ‘deregulation’ — pointing to California’s energy mess as an example of it — leaves me wondering if he really knows what he’s talking about.

A website for those addicted to, er, self-love. You gotta come to grips with the issue… er, I mean, take the situation in your own hands… er, never mind. With the graphic they have at the top of the page it’s hard to believe that this isn’t a satire site.

Missed Part 1? click here!

It was clear that new hardware was required in order to keep me a happy Mac user, so I started looking around for a new system. I was rather taken aback by the pricing on these units. Looking at the Apple store — which is a pretty accurate indication of current prices, because Apple doesn’t allow its authorized dealers to undercut their prices by much. The bottom of the line Power Mac G4, with a single 1Ghz processor, is a whopping $1499, with a paltry 256M RAM, 60G hard drive and no Superdrive. It’s also equipped with a GeForce4 MX, which is hardly current news in the graphics biz. For slightly less than $2K you can get a much better system (with twin 1.25Ghz CPUs and generally better specs). To put this in perspective, however, a year ago I build two systems from scratch, both AMD-based (a Linux and the XP box), for less than it would cost me TODAY to purchase that semi-decent Mac. The fact is that computing hardware prices are on a downward trend for everyone in the industry except for Apple, which has maintained its prices for the past couple of years.

As such, from an economic perspective I could either get that one Mac, or build two high-end PCs — or, say, one decent PC and another week’s vacation in Europe. And yes, I know that in neither case could I run OS X, but really, so what? Apple’s mainstream OS is not what it used to be in comparison with the competitors. For one thing, I myself have grown as a user, and computing itself has grown by leaps and bounds since I used to write flames for the edification of those who claimed that “PCs rule, Macs drool”. As a web developer, both professionally and in my spare time, I find that solid networking support is more important to me than eye candy. OS X makes a pretty desktop, but if most of my work is on the internet the quality and performance of the browsers I use is a more compelling factor. I’m sure that if I were to get a dual-1.25G system Mozilla would be just as fast running on that platform as it is on, say, Linux; however I already possess two systems which provide me with that level of performance.

Let’s face it, Apple is no longer the draw it used to be. Sure, years ago running Photoshop on a Windows NT system was a greatly aggravating task — the wintel box would be slower than the Mac for graphics applications. That’s simply not the case these days. PowerPC development has not, in fact, kept up with the improvements from AMD and Intel. Personally I find this baffling since Apple has been the only customer for the desktop version of the PowerPC chip for a long time, whereas AMD and Intel have had to contend with the autocratic and wildly unpredictable Microsoft as a showcase of their products. I’m sure that if there were a 3Ghz PowerPC chip now — and indeed, that if I had been able to upgrade my Mac to a 1Ghz system almost two years ago, when that was a decent but common speed for Wintel boxes — the Mac would have a significant speed advantage over Windows systems for graphics applications; however that’s not the case, and by the looks of it that situation isn’t even on the horizon for Apple. Putting two processors in the box doesn’t cover up that fact! Very few applications are written to take advantage of both CPUs. That does include Photoshop and other high-end, resource-intensive applications, but the fact remains that two 1.5Ghz CPUs do NOT equal one 3Ghz CPU when it comes to parallel computing. One may well argue that no one really needs 3G of power, but when you are attempting to run Photoshop filters on an image which is several hundred megabytes in size it could make the difference between being a happy editor and one who’s torn all his hair out.

Price is not the only consideration either. Apple was the first company to widely use USB for desktop applications, and as such has had longer than any other company to work the kinks out of the system; why then does it appear that my mac is, in my ‘stable’, the system which has the most USB-related issues? This is also baffling, especially when you consider that for at least the past 3 years Apple has not sold a system which used any serial standard older than USB — so even if you had problems with it you couldn’t just use an old ADB keyboard, as Apple eliminated that port altogether. Getting a USB-to-ADB adapter wouldn’t be of any help in those cases, for obvious reasons.

Despite its much-publicized move to PC-standard hardware, Apple deliberately left important gaps for itself to fill. They are after all a computer maker first, and not simply a software vendor like Microsoft; if they want to make money they have to sell boxes. That’s the logical reason why OS X doesn’t run on anything but the PowerPC chips. That’s also the reason why they use a different power supply than the rest of the industry — you can only get a replacement from them, and then again you have to have your computer serviced in order to get it, even though the device is easily removed and replaced. That’s why, despite the move to ATA to replace SCSI, you can’t just take any CD-RW drive and put it in a Power Mac; there are very good chances that the device simply won’t be recognized, even if it shares a brand name with the drives Apple itself uses. That’s also why you can’t buy a sound card for the Mac (with the single exception of the Sound Blaster Platinum for the Mac); many other cards are supported by Linux using work developed by people who work for free (!), but for some reason the Cupertino giant has never seen it fit to integrate that sort of hardware support in OS X. Apple’s move to more open standards was always 2 things and only 2 things — making it cheaper for Apple to produce their systems, and providing a bit of PR. Even though all Apple systems have the AGP bus for video cards, you’re still tied to a limited choice of hardware because Apple won’t write the drivers for things they don’t sell, nor will they make any effort to ease development of drivers for alternatives. That’s why their ridiculously expensive top-end desktop, at $3800, sports a Radeon 9700 Pro, when ATI has had the 9800 on the shelf for some time now. Believe me, for $3800, you can have one sweet box from Alienware.

To be continued…