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Pismo Upgrade
From Rino M. Dattilo Charles: It’s Here! Rick (Pres of NewerTech) was gracious enough to send out my notebook on a Saturday delivery (I paid of course the extra) and I have had it a weekend to play with. I have to say that after having “time” with it, and working with my daughter's 1400 (though I loved it), the Pismo is a great machine and the Newer it is even better. Now here is my report: I first boot up, I don’t know what I was expecting, but I did think, that not much had changed. It took a bit of working with the machine until I began to notice how sweet the G4 really is. Now my Pismo is, or should I say was, a 500mgz G3. We know that we don’t gain nothing in the Megahertz part, but the G4 in OS X and programs DOES make a nice difference. Now it is not that my Pismo screams, no G4 500 does, but it is much smoother and quicker. The screen redraws better, programs launch faster, and of course, iTunes, iPhoto, PhotoShop and such are wonderful on a G4. Was the upgrade worth it? I would say for me, every penny. Things that used to frustrate me about OS X, replying to an email for example, I would have to wait before I could start typing. No more with the G4. The things I was worried about seem to be ok also. I thought for sure the battery life would be less and it is not, and I also thought that the G4 would be hotter. It all seems to be the same. The bottom line is that the Pismo has some pop now, and with Jag-wire coming, this should be a happy month for me and my trusty powerbook. So, do I recommend it, YES! Would I use Newer – YES,YES. They have proved to be a wonderful, professional, and most of all personal company that did what they said they would do. Send in those Pismo’s ladies and gentlemen – and tell Newer Rino sent you! Be patient, though mine took 10 days (total), it can be more, I think I was lucky. Hope this helps and I know that this will be a pleasant surprise for most.
Pismo upgrade?
I own a Pismo 400 and am VERY interested in the upgrade to a G4 500. That said ... since your june 17 article about the upgrade, have you any advice as to: whether or not to do it (the upgrade, that is) ... and ... which vendor to use? Just wondering ... Sincerely,
Tim Stewart, Pastor
Hi Tim;
Check out Rino Dattilo's letter immediately above. :-)
Charles From Jim Crosswhite Well, I'm sorry to hear this because I've followed your WallStreet stories and your emotions and I have had the confidence in my WallStreet that you've had in yours. My own--a 266 4GB with 384MB--has, after having its trackpad replaced in the first week--has run perfectly for almost four years now. I use it every day and it has traveled quite a bit, but I also baby it, never moving the hinges needlessly, treating the ports as if they were made of glass, etc. I've dropped it twice, once in the case, once outside of it, but neither fall did any damage. It runs 9.1 now. I have been toying with the idea of installing a new 20GB IBM GNX and a sonnet G4/500 and a usb cardbus card (it has a newertech firewire cardbus card that works flawlessly) simply because, like you, I like this machine so much. I've been using the PowerBook at the office (and on the floor at home when my back goes out, and on the deck and at the table and while housesitting and in the library and at the arboretum). However, I want to use ViaVoice for X at home (G4 500MP) and at the office (WS 266), and that's probably a no go with the WS, and I would have to invest about $600-$700 just to find out. With all these stories of dying Wall Streets, I'm even more reluctant. A TiBook is beyond my means...so, I think I'll swallow my pride and put an eMac in the office for only a little more than it would cost to upgrade the WS. The eMac is just so inexpensive and so useful. I'll go on babying the WallStreet and probably keep running 9.1 on it while using X on the other two machines. I'll use it to write while I'm on the move, or on the floor, or when I need to get outdoors. May it last as long as the old Powerbook 165, which last I checked still craaaanks its disk and starts and runs fine! Best, and thanks for all the WallStreet stories, Jim Crosswhite
Hi Jim;
It was a big shock to me when the WallStreet croaked. Nothing lasts forever, but I didn't expect it to die with no warning at all.
I appreciate your reasoning regards the eMac vs. upgrading the WallStreet, and for the use you describe, I agree that it is the more sensible course.
Charles Thanks! -and about "Death of a Powerbook"
From Michael Lee
Amazing how we get attached to some Apple products! Me too.
Regards,
Hio, since your Wallstreet died.... From Rob Saunders ...can I have your hinges *runs hands together smiling evily* Seriously though do you know a decent place to get some hindges...I reallllly need to fix mine :( Rob Saunders
Hi Rob;
You can find replacement hinges (better than Apple's) at http://www.pbparts.com/
Charles From George Woodrow III A note on the use of Excel in scientific disciplines: Excel is not a good choice when accuracy is required. First, it is not compliant with the IEEE-754 standard for floating point numbers. Among other things, it does not round correctly. It used to on the Mac, and I suspect the functionality was changed on the Mac to give the same 'wrong' result as it always did on Windows. By contrast, AppleWorks rounds numbers correctly according to the IEEE standard. NIST did a study of various high precision statistical computations for a variety of programs. Excel was among the worst (if not the worst) performer. I, for one, would not trust anything complex using Excel as a computational engine. I work for a large clinical lab, and 'office' is the standard. The most complex use of Excel seems to be the automation of the monthly expense reports templates. Most people simply use it as a very primitive database, and rarely do more than sum or average rows or columns. It can't even do this correctly, due to the lack of conformity to the IEEE standard. For myself, I do 'trust' the expense report template, since it does no rounding. I use either Mathematica or StatView for anything critical. I suspect that any 'real' computations in engineering or scientific disciplines are done with similar programs, not Excel, although the results of the computations may be put in Excel or PowerPoint for display. The main limitation of AppleWorks is a limit of 500 rows. This is too limited for any serious work. Even Excel's limit of 64K rows makes it useless for number crunching in my work, or even simply organizing data. (I routinely have to deal with 500,000+ rows.) The only thing Excel has going for it is its ubiquity. It may be accurate enough for simple financial computations, but it is inadequate when high accuracy and high precision are required. George V. Woodrow III From Davide Guarisco I am a scientist/researcher in a high-tech company in Silicon Valley, and I have the exact opposite view of Dr. Hunter on M$ Office on Mac. First of all, let me just state that M$ Office is a horrible application suite. It is a pain to use, really mediocre programs at best.
Dr. Hunter writes:
Maybe, and this is really sad. Let me put aside the reasons for this for brevity. The result is that engineers are forced to use an app like Excel, which may be fine for, maybe, accountants. I see the results of this every day in other people's presentations: The graphs look *horrible*. I have only one advice to scientists reading this: Try some REAL engineering programs, like pro Fit, Igor Pro, Mathematica, Octave, etc. Your quality of life will improve dramatically, as will the quality of your work.
Hello? Ever head of LaTeX? In comparison, Word's equation editor is a toy. And the nice thing is, you don't have to use LaTeX: There is a program called "Equation services". It is available as a service and allows you to enter equations in TeX and have them imported in any app. This looks WAY better than Word equations, not to mention the fact that equations written on a PC in Office rarely show up correctly when opened on a Mac. The really good tool here is either LaTeX (free), or FrameMaker (expensive, not yet OS X native). [...]
Wrong again. Just create a PDF. Almost every computer has Acrobat Reader installed, which makes for a nice slide show player. I wish people were more curious and on the constant lookout for better tools than Office: They are out there. Finally, I admit to using PowerPoint occasionally (and hating it) and Excel, this latter just as a *table editor*! (And it's not really good at that, either) Davide
Davide Guarisco
Its not a one way street...
Hi Charles, I believe the key point about document compatibility is being missed. It's important that someone using an alternative spreadsheet package can read an Excel document. However, it's equally important that an Excel user can read the document prepared in the alternative spreadsheet. The name of the game in document compatibility is sharing information with other people, it's not a one way street. When people talk about replacing Excel, the discussions always seem to focus on being able to replicate functionality. My point is that for many users the ability to share files both ways is just as important as replicating functionality. Shades did not mention if he could save the spreadsheet created in the alternative software in a format that is readable by Excel. In addition, since formulas and graphics are the primary functionality in any spreadsheet, to have an acceptable level of document compatibility you would need to be able to transfer formulas and graphics both ways. So being able to read a tab delimited data file is not a serious test of document compatibility. If you are in a business where you share documents with your clients, you absolutely need to have document compatibility. You can't expect your clients who can barely get their Windows computers to work to be able to do anything special to read your non Excel spreadsheet files. Document compatibility is a critical requirement in this situation. Now if most Mac users using spreadsheets don't share files with people using Excel, then no problem. Applelinks has a survey capability, It would be interesting to know what proportion of spreadsheet users think that two way document compatibility is important. Bob Lunn
Hi Bob;
I'm only the most casual and occasional of spreadsheet users, but with ThinkFree Write I found that two-way file compatibility worked very well with MS Word. I can't vouch for it being 100 percent in all cases, but formatting held up nicely in the examples I tried, and ThinkFree creates clickable Word documents. I can't say if similar performance applies with Excel documents.
Perhaps we can do an informal survey on the document compatibility issue here in Moore's MailBag.
Charles From Craig Hunter Charles, Your recent mailbag had a good even discussion about MS Office, which I was glad to see. One thing I did not mention in my e-mail was the issue of file compatibility, which is extremely important. Some of the other e-mails touched on this and reminded me of my experience. I have used StarOffice on Linux, and while it is decent, it is not 100% compatible in most cases. Sometimes, this is not a problem, but in other cases it is a major pain for all those involved. It was enough of an issue that we ended up spending $1200 for VMware and MS Office XP to run on all of our Linux machines (that's $1200 per machine, which effectively kills the cost-effectiveness of Linux, but we had to do it). One thing we do is aircraft design, and as you can imagine, 100% compatibility is quite important! I agree that MS has made it difficult for anyone else to make apps compatible with the Office suite, especially Excel. That's too bad. Office has become a standard, and when it's a closed standard, it kind of puts customers in a headlock.
Thanks again,
IBM's New Power4 Offspring Chip And Apple From Fabian Westerwelle CoolMacintosh.com has posted a pretty interesting article about the positives of Apple using IBM's new Power4 offspring chip for its high-end desktop computers. Guest author Norman D. Shutler writes:
There's also a poll included that should not only serve the purpose of finding the general opinion, but might even help Apple resolve, define and guide Apple towards a more informed decision. The poll has three basic answers: Should (a), Apple embrace IBM‚s remarkable Power4 offspring chip for their top-notch desktop computers or (b), stick with Motorola‚s PowerPC offerings or (c), forget PowerPCs chips altogether and go with Intel processors? Let's get voting. http://www.coolmacintosh.com/ibmpowerpcchip080902.html Why Apple WON'T use IBM's Power4 CPU From Douglas Godfrey The Power4 CPU is intended for high end workstations and supercomputers where the CPU case can be the size of a Refridgerator. The Power4 CPU chip is only offered in an 8 way MP configuration with 4 MP CPU chips, 4 32Megabyte Cache chips, and 4 memory-I/O controller chips, all combined on a 4" square ceramic substrate with over 5000 pins. The module is called a Aircooled Thermal Conduction Module and has to handle dissipating the 350 Watts of heat output from the CPU and cache. The IBM Regatta 690 uses 4 Power4 modules for a 32 CPU SMP configuration with 64Gigabytes of SDRAM and costs about $100,000.
Hi Douglas;
All I know about this is what I read in the articles I linked to in the news brief, but they stated that this new chip to be introduced in October and *based* on the Power4 technology is designed to be a desktop and low end server CPU.
Charles From Judson
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020805&s=blackburn080502
Hi Judson;
An interesting read. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
As you no doubt inferred I would, I disagree radically and profoundly with Blackburn's analysis and conclusions, but he writes extremely well.
While I believe that Jesus Christ is the ground of all truth and reality, indeed the Creator of everything, and consequently true science and reason have to ultimately be consonant with the Christian revelation, there is an element of faith involved that is indispensible to this belief.
Absent faith, or at least an intellectual openness to the possibility of faith, The old, "if I have to explain it to you; you'll never understand" maxim applies. Blackburn just doesn't get it.
Charles IBM woos Apple with PowerPC "on steroids" From Ed M. Holy crap! What do you have to say about this? Ed See above. Charles Inquiries Re: "Interfacelib--UpTime" & "ATI Displays" From Martin A. Totusek Greetings all, While the ATI RADEON MAC EDITION" PCI (with the newer extensions, etc. added also appears to function under Mac OS 8.1 (I also added the newer APPLE "Display Enabler" version 2.5 extension to Mac OS 8.1), when you try to open the "ATI Displays" (Control Panel) to check or adjust the settings, you get: ---------------------------- The application "ATI Displays" could not be opened because "Interfacelib--UpTime" could not be found. ---------------------------- Inquiries: 1) What exactly is "Interfacelib--UpTime"? 2) Where can it (the file itself) be located inside of Mac OS 8.6 or higher? 3) Is it embedded into Mac OS 8.6 or higher? I also note that the Mac OS 8.1 Monitors & Sound (Control Panel) also now crashes IF you try the "Geometry" or "Color" buttons in the Control Panel itself, although all other buttons and functions apear to work fine.
Sincerely,
Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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