New version of Basilisk?

[Stiletto]

To Gwenole (if he's reading):
Are you or Lauri planning on updating Basilisk II within the next few months, or are you going to make me dust off my compiler?

*imagining playing EV:Nova with Christian's latest upgrades, your JIT emulation taken from UAE, and Lauri's own fixes*

Stiletto

[Guest]

Of course, you could always get a REAL Mac. I'd like to get a G4, but I've only got enough money for either a Porsche or G4, not both.

[rob_squared]

Heh heh, shut up.

[All.]

Of course, you could always get a REAL Mac. I'd like to get a G4, but I've only got enough money for either a Porsche or G4, not both.

I've got a compromise. Go out with Janie Porche. She might let you use her PowerBook G4 and various other "goodies." That way you get your G4 and your Por[s]che.

[DirectXFreak]

What I want to know is how mac can be soooo much better then windows and yet cost soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much more and not have as much software? I can get a top-o-the-line windows comp for $1000 (build my own) or I can get a mac w/ an 800 Mhz( ) G4 and 256 MB (SDRAM ) I don't get it!!!!!!

[DirectXFreak]

(Buy the mac for 2000-3000 $)

[Mac Emu]

I'd like to party with Ellen Feiss. beep beep beep

[maggard@mac.com]

What I want to know is how mac can be soooo much better then windows and yet cost soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much more and not have as much software? I can get a top-o-the-line windows comp for $1000 (build my own) or I can get a mac w/ an 800 Mhz( ) G4 and 256 MB (SDRAM ) I don't get it!!!!!!

You're comparing Apples to Oranges (sorry).

Price out a name-brand PC with support, comparable hardware, warranty, etc. to Apple's and guess what: Apple is usually right on price. And yes, both of those will cost more then your screw-it-together-at-home deal; but then you don't offer 24/7 phone support, web site, quality control, warranty, etc.

(Surely you're not so ignorant that you're not aware of this?)

As to the speed of Macs vs PCs, as anyone will tell you MHz isn't the only measure. RAM speed, bus speeds, controller design, all of those play in too (and yes Apple isn't stellar at any of them.) Then there's how the OS uses these which in MacOS X's case is pretty good, Apple does tune their hardware and software to work together well, better then most MS OS's on x86 hardware.

On top of all of that, and beyond the "my theoretical specs beat your theoretical specs" game there's the how-fast-can-I-get-done-what-I-want-to-do and how-much-grief-will-this-box-give-me-a-week which is where I opine Macs blow PCs out of the water. Doesn't matter how fast the damn thing can run if it's toes-up half the time or I'm jumping through hoops to get it to do whatever, screaming with frustration.

Personally I use both Macs & Wintel and appreciate each for their strengths. In my experience folks on Macs get more done with less hassle but PCs (and their application ecology) do offer more in some vertical ways. However after 20 years geeking how smokin' fast the hardware is beyond fast-enough rarely makes any real difference.

As to the sheer volume of software Macs are holding their own. Indeed for corporate/industrial/scientific applications they're surging as all of the unix apps get ported over; it's a far faster growth rate then NT (2k,xp, etc.) has and catching up quickly for numbers. Beyond that aside from a few vertical market apps I've not seen anything recently that couldn't be done on a Mac as with a PC. Sure sometimes on the Mac side there's 4 packages instead of 16 to do whatever but as only one gets used anyhow the difference isn't critical.

[The Balance Of Judgement]

Glad some has the same opinion as me, at last a Mac user who uses other platforms and realizes Macs have thier downs too.....unlike those Mac Zealouts who think world conquest is the only way...

[Guest]

Just buy a mac you cheap bastards!

[rob_squared]

*judo chop!*

[phirkel]

Okay...to the Mac and PC evangelist.

a) Saying "Comparing Apples to Oranges" is a very uneducated and inaccurate way of saying it. Perhaps comparing an SGI Tezro to a PowerMac G4 would be a better instance to use this analogy. A better way to put it would be "Comparing Spartan apples to Golden Delicious Apples". These are 32-bit CPUs, they have similar registers. The fact that the PPC CPU is RISC is irrelivant in this comparison, because it still executes the instructions at 800MHz.

b) Going on about RISC, yes, certain tasks can be done with one instruction that would take 3 or 4 on an Intel CPU, however, when you factor in other optimizations (SSE and so on), this fact is irrelivant. Any decent programmer nowadays can perform multi instruction tasks with a single SSE instruction.


So, MHz to MHz, they are equal. It's where the optimizations come in. A good programmer can make anything happen.


c) "Roll your own" or "Get someone to roll a computer for you" is an excellent way to save money. I can throw together an amazing rig for under $700, and a super rig for a little over $1000 (that's Canadian, folks) Name Brand PCs are actually a dying trend. Smaller manufacturers are making a fortune by outselling Compaq, HP, IBM, and so on. Simply because you get more for less from these smaller businesses. Apple went the proprietary route, which means you're gonna have to shell out 2.5 to 3 times more than you would for a PC. And the PC tends to be of better calibre than this Mac. If apple were to a) make it possible to use a non-Apple BIOS/ROM (with PCs we have the option of using an Award/Phoenix, an AMI BIOS, or you can roll your own, can't do that with Macs though) and b) make a reference board so that manufacturers could create their own motherboard with an Apple Chipset, or even an Arctica Chipset, Apple could have a fighting chance.

d)

As to the speed of Macs vs PCs, as anyone will tell you MHz isn't the only measure. RAM speed, bus speeds, controller design, all of those play in too (and yes Apple isn't stellar at any of them.) Then there's how the OS uses these which in MacOS X's case is pretty good, Apple does tune their hardware and software to work together well, better then most MS OS's on x86 hardware.

This statement impressed me until the last phrase. Apple, frankly, relies on gimicks to attract customers. Their bus speeds are far from superb, they use old technologies that have been around for PCs for ages. But, Microsoft gets too much beating on by users. They have to support a massive, ever-growing base of hardware. This is part of why people have problems with Windows -- not because the programming sucks though, but rather, because the hardware is crappy/not to spec, or has a crappy, manufacturer-made driver.

However, reading all this stuff in this thread has made me realize how much I love SGI's Rxx000 workstations...nobody can argue their PC is more powerful.

Oh, and Apple's market share has dropped.

For shame.

[Guest]

wow for ounce i agree with you

[robojam]

I'm not going to get into the 'which is better' argument, but one thing that I want to point out is that all hardware manufacturer's complain that M$ won't give access to parts of Windows source code that would allow them to write good drivers. If M$ was willing to write drivers for all hardware this would be fine, but it sucks that they don't give hardware manufacturers the opportunity to write good drivers in the first place.

[phirkel]

I'm not going to get into the 'which is better' argument, but one thing that I want to point out is that all hardware manufacturer's complain that M$ won't give access to parts of Windows source code that would allow them to write good drivers. If M$ was willing to write drivers for all hardware this would be fine, but it sucks that they don't give hardware manufacturers the opportunity to write good drivers in the first place.

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*phew* Had to get the anger out of my system.

Okay, judging from what you've said, you've never written a driver in your life, or even made a half-hearted attempt at it.

First of all, you do not need the source code for an operating system to write a driver. So I think your factoid there is a bit off. Microsoft has extensively documented all the calls you would need to program a driver in Windows, and really, most of the work with a driver is you making an interface with the Windows calls and the hardware itself.

You do NOT need the source to do this. You just need to know what the OS is going to make your driver do.

Ever hear of the concept of a black box? That's what Windows is. It takes input and gives output. That's all you need to know. If you know what output/input Windows is giving you, you don't need to know what windows is doing with the information, you just need to program your driver to react.

END RANT.

I'm all for open source (as I'm sure people can tell), but it isn't the be all and end all.

[robojam]

I understand what you are saying, but the problem isn't the lack of documentation for API calls, but the problems of debugging drivers when there are problems with 'protection errors', or anything else that crashes Windows.

I used to work for a company that produced marine electronics, and used Windows CE as the OS. The problems they had with writing drivers was that they couldn't debug beyond their own C++ code, and the source for Windows is not available, so it can't be debugged. The result is that there are bugs that remain in the drivers when they go to release that can't be fixed.

I'm sure Apple aren't any better at this, but I do understand the frustrations of the programmers that I worked with. That was the basis and reason for my post.

[Neospy]

Apple computers use proccessors that have clock speeds lower than PCs, but they have more "power" using a PowerPC processor (note the name )



>Neospy 8)

[robojam]

The clock speed isn't a good direct comparison considering the different number of registers that the two processors have.

Essentially a PPC processor is using 4 times are many registers for each clock cycle compared to an x86. This doesn't mean 4 times as fast as there are lots of other factors and any bottlenecks that might occurs in the bus, RAM, etc.

Basically, don't compare clock speeds as it's meaningless.

[Neospy]

The clock speed isn't a good direct comparison considering the different number of registers that the two processors have.

Essentially a PPC processor is using 4 times are many registers for each clock cycle compared to an x86. This doesn't mean 4 times as fast as there are lots of other factors and any bottlenecks that might occurs in the bus, RAM, etc.

Basically, don't compare clock speeds as it's meaningless.

I understand that, It's like the endless AMD vs. Intel speed thing that AMD is got only 2.? ghz and Intel has 3.6? ghz but amd says their just as fast. That was off topic, yes i know but it may help some people.

>Neospy

[robojam]

You're right, that's almost as bad a comparison as there are factors other than clock speed to take into account.

For a start, I've heard that AMD has put a lot of effort into backwards compatibility with 16-bit application instructions which is why a lot of gamers prefer them.

It's all pretty meaningless when you just look at the numbers. We're probably better off just comparing how it feels to use it.

[Simba7]

I'm a huge AMD fan and most of my systems utilize AMD processors (K6, AthlonXP, or Athlon64). I've noticed Intel's trying to copy AMD now (AMD64 instruction set) and I find that hilarious.

AMD does give more bang for the buck, though. Compare prices between AMD and Intel, not to mention the benchmarks. Who wins?

Also, can you get a customized Mac with the following:

SATA Capabilities
DDR400 RAM
ATI Radeon X800 AGP

..I doubt it.. Look how long it took them to do IDE, or UltraWide SCSI.

Also, with PCI-Express coming out soon, I wonder if Apple will adopt it soon.

[maxi76]

the powermac g5 is pci-x ready, I know it doesn't work exactly like pci-express, but is near.

the same mac has sata hd, ddr400 and ATI RADEON 9600 XT with 128MB DDR.

and the list to customize it is huge.

I also know that when you buy a mac you're paying much more of what it could realy cost, I have a friend who plans to sell them, and i.e. if he buyies 50 g5, the cost for each one es U$s 450, very far from the U$s2000 on the apple site.

Other topic to consider is the way you feel working on a mac and a pc.
I work in advertising and web design and I use both (G3 and 4, and PC AMD 2600+) and I prefer mac cause I feel more free and the workspace is too much flexible.

[jawa78]

New macs are shipping with sata drives and ddr 400 support X800 agp i dont knwo about.

[PPC_Digger]

PCI-X is already implemented in the G5 and the optional gigabit ethernet card IS pci-x. when nvidia and ati release their pci-x graphics cards, the current G5's will be able to operate with them.

BTW i think computer speed should be measured with MIPS (million instructions per second), because then you can see the real speed, without the instructions per cycle interfering. for example, my athlon 4 does 4.85 MIPS, compared to its 1300 MHz, it means it does one instruction per ~250 clock cycles (uncelievable he?)