Arrrr!
Walk the plank and jump off the mast, you horrible little man!
(Note to self: When referring to Bill Gates, stop using pirate
speech, as neither funny nor appropriate.)*
Good day, dear virus-free members of that more and more elitistic
cult of Apple users. Now that we all have stopped grinning and gloating
to our Windoze using friends after our OS has once again been kept free
of any weird script-kiddies virus catastrophes, it's time to clean the
inbox of "re: movie" files and go back to work.
I gather the electricity is up again wherever you read this, as I am
pretty sure this column is not yet syndicated for international print
use. The news roundup this past week for the Apple community has
actually been quite positive, but only if you're not waiting for one of
the new G5s, in which case there seems to be a slight delay in your
order.
As Slashdot reported
recently, Virginia Tech has ordered 1,100 Dual 2 GHz G5s and
apparently have jumped the cue with this project. The orders for VT
have been (so we're told) prioritised, and everybody else will just
have to wait. If this baby works, the project is to jump into the Top 5
of the Linpack Supercomputer list, which I think is a first for
an Apple powered cluster. Good luck to them and happy wiring.
The other customers waiting for their supercomputers will have to
wait a bit, though.
The next bit of good news is the first prerelease of the upcoming
1.0 version of Mplayer.
I don't know about you guys and girls, but my Mplayer has slowly but
surely replaced the rather clumsy QuickTime player - at least on my
humble and aging 500 MHz
iBook, it plays AVIs. MPEGs, MOVs, and even has taken over playing
streaming content destined for the (still in stone age beta) Windows
Media Player rather snappy even in larger windows. Kudos to this
Hungary-based project.
Access to a range of free software that works is obviously one of
the numerous benefits of having a *nix-based operating system, and
everybody who has Fink and X-Windows installed will vouchsafe for
that.
There is bad news as well: According to Germany's most influential
computer mag c't, Apple's
current hardware is overpriced and underperforming: They compared the
iBook to its cheaper PC colleagues and, although it got good points for
usability and design, it wasn't able to keep up with the Windoze
colleagues when it came to speed, ports, screen, and, of course,
price.
They looked even less favourable on the smallest of the new G5s (1.6
GHz PowerPC G5): Although they congratulated Apple on the brilliant
design and accessibility of the hardware, they criticised the rather
old video card and the price. With 10.2.7, they did not see a
significant speed increase compared with the 1 GHz G4s and
commented that hopefully later OS X versions would give the user
the speed increase we'd all be hoping for.
The most damning, however, was the comparison to a 2.6 GHz Pentium 4
machine for a third of the G5's price, which outshone the Apple's
performance in every category. That really hurts.
So all there is left to do is cross our fingers and hope that
Panther might put the tiger in the tank of the smaller G5s.
Literally speaking. 
* Editor's note: September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day.
This has nothing to do with Bill Gates, Microsoft, sharing music files,
or Macs. It just seemed the right place to drop a link. ;-)
dk
