Author: Terry McCracken
Date: 22:29:55 11/21/03
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On November 21, 2003 at 21:02:47, Steven Edwards wrote: >On November 21, 2003 at 19:51:10, Dann Corbit wrote: >>On November 21, 2003 at 19:33:33, Andreas Guettinger wrote: > >>As is well known, if you are doing video processing, the Power Mac is a >>top-flite, somewhat overpriced machine. And darn good looking too. > >The PPC with Altivec (G4s and G5s) is rather good with audio processing as well >and that's what I use to rip my CD collection. As of a few weeks ago, Apple no >longer sells the G3 CPU that lacks Altivec. > >It may be that the 128 thirty-two bit registers of an Altivec unit could be >quite useful as a register cache in a chess program. It's exactly the amout of >space neede to store either an AttackFrom[64] or an AttackTo[64] bitboard array. > >Are Macs expensive? Yes. Are Macs overpriced? The short answer is: probably, >but not by much for equivalently equipped competing machines. The long answer >(for programmers) has a lot to do with ease of use (hands down winner), freely >avaliable development tools (Xcode from Apple, the entire GNU toolset, the X >Window toolset, etc.), and longevity. > >I have used Microsoft's various development toolchains starting back from the >late 1970s and continuing to the current Visual Studio suite. But now only when >people pay me to do it; I haven't used any MS tools for my own projects since >1987. Apple's Xcode IDE with its new zerolink feature and automated distributed >builds is the way to go, at least for now. > >For the area of longevity, I'm typing this on my oldest G4 Mac, a 400 MHz dektop >model that came out four years ago. It runs 24*7 doing chess and Seti work >while remaining nearly problem-free. In fact, the only difficulty I have is >rebooting after the occasional brief power failure; I need to let the machine >stay turned off for 30 seconds or so before restarting -- perhaps the original >power supply with over 30,000 in-use hours is getting ready for a permanent >vacation. I run my IBM 24/7 for four years plus now, and have no hardware problems, IBM if it's one of their high end machines, work well without incident for many years. I hope to get a few more years out of it until I can afford a new 64 bit computer. That may take awhile, they'll be costly, for a really good machine. Terry
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