Mac Musings

Week In Review

23 October 1999 - Daniel Knight

A quick look back at some of this week's editorials on Low End Mac.

• Setting Up a 6100, 10/18/99
• SETI@home, 10/19/99
• Free Mac Internet Access, 10/20/99
• Itanium or Itanic?, 10/20/1999
• Jesux: Sanctified Linux?, 10/20/99
• The 1.7 GHz G4, 10/21/99

Setting Up a 6100, Mac Musings, 10/18/1999

Several readers have noted that you can further reduce the price of a 6100 system by shopping around - and that you can free a lot of hard drive space by pulling help files, unwanted applications, etc., from the normal Mac OS build.

I've also tested the 6100/60 with a 256 KB level 2 cache (see benchmarks). Surprisingly, I've found it makes far less difference on the 6100/60 than it does on the 6100/66. If anyone knows what changes Apple made to the 6100 when it increased CPU speed (other than the obvious one, CPU speed), I'd appreciate knowing. I'm surprised at how much better a performer the 6100/66 is, much more than 10% more speed should account for.

SETI@home, 10/19/1999

Team Mac Observer has moved up from 21st place to 20th this week. I've also learned that you can make SETI@home run significantly faster by turning off the graphical display and letting is just crunch numbers. One reader reported his Blue G3/300 crunches work units in about 10 hours, compared with 17 hours on my Blue G3/300 at work with graphics on.

To disable the display, choose Preferences and set "Go to blank screen" at anything other than Never. The shorter the setting, the more processing power your Mac can dedicate to crunching numbers instead of making a pretty display.

Free Mac internet access, The iMac Channel, 10/20/1999

Some readers wrote to remind us that FreeI.net requires a PowerPC processor - there is no version for 68K Macs.

Itanium or Itanic?, Mac Musings, 10/20/1999

Several readers wrote to thank us for such an understandable view of the Itanium processor. For those wanting more techical details, follow the links.

Jesux: Sanctified Linux?, Mac Linux Links,10/20/1999

Okay, Jesux is not a real project, although some people apparently believe it is a good idea to build a specifically Christian version of Linux. On the other hand, the perpetrator of the hoax even corrected my quote from a Steve Taylor song, so I know he's pretty cool.

The 1.7 GHz G4, Things Macintosh, 10/21/99

Rodney O. Lain's suggestion that Apple should market the G4 by "Pentium equivalent" MHz was received with open arms. In an era where chip architecture has more to do with performance than MHZ, we need some way of comparing processing power across platforms.

This is especially important since Motorola and IBM seem stuck a couple hundred megahertz behind Intel, Alpha, and AMD.