[Fwd: Re: [luau] NEWS: New Copyprotected CD's destroy iMacs]

[Eric Jeschke]

| Eric-
| 
| First, it's sad to know that another good young professor is leaving the 
| state of Hawaii.  Realistically, however, unless you have strong local 
| ties (or unless our politicians allow us to change things), it would be 
| insane for any talented professional with any kind of ambition to stay 
| on the islands.  :-(

Thanks for the kind words.  A bit premature actually, since I'm not
going anywhere yet.  Where did you hear I was leaving?
 
| On the hardware part, if you're willing to shop around, for the same 
| price you are paying for a PPC, you can probably get a better PC (power 
| is never the question, but I am talking about a better designed PC). 
|  Recently I upgraded my PC to an 1800+ Athlon XP with 512 MB PC2100 DDR 
| RAM for a grand total of less than $400.  Performance-wise, it beats any 
| iMac that I tried at CompUSA. Imagine what kind of iMac you can get with 
| $400?

Agreed.  I've built one of the same (Athlon 1800+) and it blows away
the 500 MHz iBook.  Apple likes to claim that their processors cannot
be compared to Pentiums and AMDs on clock speed alone--that's true,
there are many other factors involved, but considering all of those
factors, unless a piece of code is highly optomized for the PPC and the
equivalent code is non-optomized for the x86 architecture, the Intel and
AMD chips are so far ahead in the clock speed race that they will smoke
the PPC.

I've heard that Apple runs their photoshop filter tests (why is it
always photoshop filters and nothing else!) with optomized PPC code
vs. vanilla x86 code for the Windows photoshop benchmark.  I don't know
this to be true, but I'd sure like to see some numbers for something
besides photoshop filters!
 
| However, we should also not lose sight that Apple controls both the OS 
| and the hardware; whereas, Microsoft never lets PC designers fully know 
| what's going on.  As a result, most PCs are extremely dull compared to 
| the Macs.

It's true.  I would fear Apple or Sun much more if they were the
monopolist--imagine being locked into proprietary hardware and software
instead of just sw.  Shades of the gold old IBM mainframes days...
I've always said that Apple is best when they are lean and hungry--I'd
hate to see them grow beyond about 10% of the market because they will
stop innovating.  Even the Mac faithful remember the stagnant years
after Jobs left.

| There is another reason why PCs are inherently inferior to the Macs.
| 
| A few years ago, I was consulting VIA on their patent fights against 
| Intel and began paying attention to CPU patch logs.  Many are probably 
| not aware that AMD CPUs (both the K6's and more particularly the 
| Athlons) are actually more conforming to the Windows specs's than the 
| Pentiums.  Sometimes, because Intel was so insistent on not making the 
| required modifications, Microsoft had to modify its code.  However, this 
| screws up everyone else who followed Microsoft's published spec.  Both 
| Microsoft and Intel seem to greatly enjoy the confusion caused by their 
| apparent (but probably conspiring) disagreement.  Without the fear and 
| uncertainty factors, Microsoft and Intel would quickly lose their
| dominance.
 
Interesting.  I've been reading occasionally about open architecture
CPU designs; essentially a processor designed in the "open source"
development style, simulated, tested, debugged, etc.  Then you can
download an FPGA design and burn your own RISC processor.  Imagine the
days when that happens!  All sorts of companies burning these things for
you and competing on price, features, performance, etc.  That will be
great. 

| Hopefully, the transparency of the Linux OS will change the situation. 
|  In the future, the Linux PCs will be not only more powerful, but better 
| designed.

The beauty of Linux is that it is commodity sw on commodity hw.  You
have lots of choice in both.
 
Interesting list, glad I joined.

--Eric

-- 
Eric Jeschke, Ph.D.      |  Assistant Professor of Computer Science
jeschke at hawaii.edu       |  The University of Hawaii at Hilo
808-974-7392             |  200 W. Kawili St., Hilo, HI 96720
http://cs.uhh.hawaii.edu/~jeschke