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Tom Owad
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MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« on: Jul 21st, 2001, 10:01am » |
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Myles asked for it and I've been wanting to rant, too, so here it is: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations.
The Keynote was indeed dissapointing. I came to MacWorld really hoping to buy Mac OS X.1 to run on my Powerbook G4's external hard drive. The "sneek preview" did nothing to placate me. Jobs' demonstration of X.1's improved speed was worthless when he didn't tell us what hardware he was running. The interface improvements (the moving dock) are definitely an improvement, but still not nearly enough (maybe I need to buy Jobs a copy of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines). The fact that it isn't shipping yet made the whole demo a bit irrelevant - as it did many of the "10 on X" products. I was impressed with ViaVoice, though.
World Book (the company) introduced the new World Book (the encyclopedia) for Mac OS X. While no doubt an excellent encyclopedia, its interface exemplifies everything I dislike about Mac OS X: complete form over function. At 800x600 and 1024x768 resolution the program window (and it all runs in one window) takes up the entire screen. It cannot be resized. The top of the window is lined with large buttons which could have been replaced with a single pull-down menu in the menu bar. The left-most quarter of the window is frequently empty, but filled with a pretty blue background so that you can't get to anything beneath it. Articles appear on the left-most three quarters of the display, in an immovable, non-resizable section. It is impossible to place an encyclopedia entry and a word processing document side by side. You have to keep switching back and forth. Interfaces like this really irritate me. We need another reference product like Infopedia.
The explanation of the "megahertz myth" was interesting and well done; I enjoyed it. The Mac-PC speed comparisons are getting a bit old. Is there anybody that doubts the Mac will win in a MacWorld keynote address given by Steve Jobs?
The choice of "white" for the new Power Mac is interesting. Isn't this awfully similar to the "Platinum" of old? Apple computes are now available in white (Power Mac, iBook, iMac), grey (Powerbook G4, iMac), and blue (iMac). Where are all the users that cried "no beige!"? (Apparently that was last years trend.) Of course, the upside to this is that the less creative Apple's computers look, the more creative our hacks look. Easily the best looking computer I saw at the Expo was Chuck Goolsbee's custom-painted Powerbook 2400. Pictures coming soon.
Marathon Computer (makers of the RackMac) had a nice booth with their rackmount systems. As usual, the quality of their cases put Apple's to shame.
Pitsco Evil Block Company ® Dacta had a booth. I found their booth staff to be as unfriendly as their copyright lawyers. The moment I mentioned I wasn't an educator the fellow wouldn't give me the time of day. I went back the next day (there were different people there), told the representative I was considering buying new Mindstorms equipment for a classroom, and this time they were very helpful. 
I purchased a copy of Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux 2.0, which I'm looking forward to install (instead of Mac OS X). I'm running a backup of my Powerbook's HD right now, but hope to install linux later today. I think Terra Soft may have been the highlight of the show.
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Tom Owad
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g3head
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #1 on: Jul 21st, 2001, 9:35pm » |
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I'm not in NY but I watched the webcast, the only good things about the keynote was the "megahertz myth" demonstration and the droping of the patterns in iMacs.
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smykes24
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #2 on: Jul 22nd, 2001, 9:44am » |
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According to the one of the Apple guys Jobs was using a Dual 800 in the old case which would be easy to do. There is no difference between the old machines and the new machines besides the clock speed, the plastic on the front is different, the heat sink is larger and the 733 is slower (no L3 Cache). If we want to see any dramatic speed increases IBM has to start making G4 chips. Lets face it, I was optimistic for this expo, but we are going to be lucky if we see any GHz barrier broken even at MW SF this winter in any kind of numbers. Personally I don't think Motorlla is any where near breaking 1 Ghz, if they were, we surely would have seen the 867 clocked up 133 Mhz. I am starting to think that Motorolla could care less about how much speed they get out of their chips. The other question is whether or not we should care if the Ghz barrier is broken? Apple did an excellent job dismissing the MHz myth during the keynote where we all saw the two most powerful chips available today were Sun's and Motorolla's, with a rather coincidental ommision of AMD. In my opinion I think we should stop worying about Clock Speed but we should start worrying about BUS speed. A 6.5 ratio between a 133 MHz system bus and a 867 Mhz clock speed is disgusting. One can only hope that Apple with the G5 processor will make the switch from PC 133 to DDR RAM hopefully vastly improving bus speeds. A fast clock isn't much good if your bus can't keep up... just my two cents... oh yeah and the coolest part of the Expo? The Tekserve booth with the iMac painted a 128k beige with a rainbow apple and an Attari emulator running on it. That was cool 
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Tom Owad
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #3 on: Jul 22nd, 2001, 12:26pm » |
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Where was the Tekserve booth? I missed this!
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Tom Owad
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smykes24
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #4 on: Jul 22nd, 2001, 3:10pm » |
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The Tekserve booth was awesome, probably the highlight of the expo for myself. They were located in the big room with Apple and Microsoft and IBM as you walked in to the room they were on the right side of the room. Their booth was made out of barn board or something, looked very hacked. On the front wall they had a couple of funny things including the iLive artificial heart and the iStink deoderant. On another wall they had the very nifty 128k iMac and old DIMMS and SIMMS and even a 233 MHz Wallstreet processor board, all dead I presumed. The other neat part of the booth was the ?iCart?. Basically this was a functioning golf cart painted Bondi color, with lit up Harmon Kardon Apple Pro Speakers for headlights, and then a couple G4's on the back. I have pictures of the iMac 128 and the iCart I will try to post them.
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Dr. Bob
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Megahertz myth
« Reply #5 on: Jul 23rd, 2001, 9:51pm » |
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If you want to know about CPU performance and the "megahertz myth", download this pdf and read it very carefully.
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/summary/local/summary.pdf
Compare real performance figures and find out just how badly the Pentiums and Athlons are kicking our butts.
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Dr. Bob
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Tom Owad
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #6 on: Jul 24th, 2001, 5:37am » |
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Ok, I saw the booth, but missed the iMac. I saw the golf cart, mistook the goofy thing in the steering wheel for an LCD display, and was really dissapointed when I found out it wasn't even a working computer.
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Tom Owad
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smykes24
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #7 on: Jul 24th, 2001, 1:06pm » |
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Never even thought about wether or not the thing worked as a Mac, but it is kind of disapointing that it was none functional as a CPU. It sounded like it worked as a golf cart. Allthough somewhat dissapointing, I have to admit that the Apple Pro Speakers lit up for headlights was cool. I wonder how they went about doing that.
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smykes24
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #8 on: Jul 24th, 2001, 2:42pm » |
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SMYKES24 Posted on: July 22nd, 2001, 1:44pm
"Personally I don't think Motorlla is any where near breaking 1 Ghz, if they were, we surely would have seen the 867 clocked up 133 Mhz."
Looks like I was wrong, can't say that I am dissapointed. http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~t-imai/g4de1.html The question remains, how stable is it?
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g3head
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #9 on: Jul 24th, 2001, 5:29pm » |
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I wonder if you can get the dual 800's up to a gigahertz?
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Tom Owad
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #10 on: Jul 24th, 2001, 6:11pm » |
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Wow. Anybody gutsy enough to try clocking their G4 up to one gigahertz? That would be something to brag about!
P.S. SMYKES24: The "then" in your sig should be a "than"
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Tom Owad
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Dr. Bob
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Dual 800 to 1GHZ
« Reply #11 on: Jul 24th, 2001, 10:43pm » |
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Absolutely not. You *might* make 866 for a little while. That dual 800 really sucks down the juice, and you'd have a pretty hard time keeping it cool enough to overclock and be stable. Since that's not even 10%, I wouldn't push your luck.
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Dr. Bob
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blue7500
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #12 on: Jul 26th, 2001, 6:03pm » |
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g3head, i totally, TOTALLY agree about the MHz Myth &, well NO MORE PATTERNS FOR ALL!!!! WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY FOR MAC LOVERS!!!!!!!!!!
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blue7500
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Re: MacWorld NY: Lowered Expectations
« Reply #13 on: Jul 26th, 2001, 6:10pm » |
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Dr. Bob, that really hurts. Why did you go out and look for that, anyway? Do you like Mac over PC?? 
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Dr. Bob
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ouch
« Reply #14 on: Jul 26th, 2001, 10:34pm » |
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I'm a huge mac fan. I have been for many years. But I'm also a fan of the truth. I resent propaganda and misinformation. The simple fact is, PC's are much much faster. If we want to build a better product than the other guy, then we have to take a good look at the other guy's stuff. To quote another user on this board, Myles Robinson "To know progress, you need to know what it has rolled over or left behind."
BTW: I originally found CPU info center when I was looking for performance data on my SparcStations.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 26th, 2001, 10:44pm by Dr. Bob » |
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