Warp wrote:
>   How is that comparing a Macintosh with an AMD64? That's comparing the old
> MacOS with Windows.

It's comparing both.   Actually, all it's really saying is "stuff that took 
a trivial amount of time 10 years ago still takes a trivial amount of time."

No surprise there, really.

I think his evaluation of what "modern office workers" do with their 
computers is a bit naive. People do corporate taxes, payroll, budgets, 
powerpoint slides, financial analysis, database whacking, SAP, CAD design, 
video rendering for presentations, architectural design, etc. That's not 
even counting stuff like Exchange that needs networking.

Of course, someone who really wanted to push an agenda would just say that's 
  not "usual" office stuff, in the traditional "no true Scotsman" pattern.

>   It is possible to set up a PC so that it uses coreboot and a architecture-
> customized lightweight linux distro. You can get from power-on to the end of
> the boot sequence in something like 2 or 3 seconds.

Damn. I don't even get out of POST in 3 seconds. :-)

I hear Windows boots incredibly fast if you don't boot it off of rotational 
media also.
http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/
Scroll about 1/3 down to the first barchart that doesn't look like a 
screenshot. And that's with the full Vista bit, not hacking out every part 
that your machine doesn't support at the moment. :-) Most of the speed-ups 
in the Linux booting came from not waiting for hardware to initialize that 
you knew wasn't there, as I recall.

I've been wondering lately at what size memory and disk speed it starts 
being slower to come out of hibernation than just rebooting.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no
   CD I knoooow!

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Warp wrote:
>   Does "typical office use" include things like opening and editing
> a 1600x1200 full color image for a powerpoint presentation?

Agreed. I think people way underestimate what's "typical" nowadays. Anyone 
who actually *uses* computers at work wouldn't be happy with a Plus these days.

I go to the dentist. While I stand there, they pull up my records, talk to 
the insurance company automatically to find out how much is covered and how 
much I'll owe. They take pictures of my broken tooth and from that the 
software generates a 3D CAD file describing the cap that needs to be built, 
annotated with clearances. They send that to the people who manufacture the 
cap by saying "yep, looks right", <click>. They plug the X-Ray receiver into 
the front of the PC and take x-rays, which they send to the specialist 
across town and to the insurance company to show the specialist what needs 
to be done and prove to the insurance company it was done. They schedule me 
to come back to get the cap put on, and a week before the appointment I get 
an SMS reminding me of the appointment along with an email. Which of these 
steps isn't typical for a modern dentist office? Which of these steps would 
a Mac Plus have no trouble with? Maybe finding a slot in the schedule of 
hundreds of patients going a year or more into the future, as long as you 
only wanted one person in the office able to see the schedule?

Alternately, compare what a Mac Plus can do to what an Apple ][ can do. 
Editing a 300K text file was completely beyond anything an Apple ][ could 
do. Yet, an Apple ][ could edit a 3K text file quite as easily and fast as a 
Mac Pro could.

Altho way back when, when Apple ][ was just starting to show its age, my 
boss pointed out that the Apple ][ could outperform by a factor of four or 
five the mainframe we had at the time. There just wasn't any I/O processors 
capable of reading a thousand input records a minute or printing 600 lines 
per minute, so we stuck with the NCR Century 50 we had until it melted. It 
doesn't help if you can calculate the report in 20 minutes instead of 200 
minutes if it's going to take you 20 hours instead of 2 hours to print them out.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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