Re: hosers-talk: i love fedex

["Jon Stewart" <stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > FedEx brought me my new iMac this morning, around 8:30. It's starting up. 
> > Seems to be working. It's bitchen cool at this point...
> 
> The lamp-shaped dealie?  I'm holding out for a G5, which is supposed to 
> have benchmarks up there with the (nearly) late, great Alpha and the IBM 
> Power4.  Sweetness.  


If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's this: never hold 
out for a processor Moto hasn't yet shipped.

I would think that fast G4s would be pretty comparable to Alphas, with 
much lower power characteristics (Alphas are fucking radiators). Alphas 
really shine at floating point; G4s can use Altivec for floating point, so 
for the applications that REALLY NEED floating point (ie. those that are 
likely to be vectorizable) would probably be faster on the G4. Really, 
Altivec is the neatest chip innovation in the last five years. It's too 
bad that IBM couldn't be persuaded to manufacture it, 'cuz Motorola has 
lousy manufacturing processes.

Alphas probably have faster memory subsystems, though.


> Though I probably still won't get one, to be honest, since I'll be a 
> poor-assed grad student.  I got my first offer today, and it looks like
> Tom is going to be living on $17,000/9 months.  This is upstate
> New York we're talking about, so rent could be ugly...I might have to
> take Jon up on the whole congressional web-site scam ;) yet.


That's about how much I'm getting by on, maybe even less. It's slightly 
doable. That's why I'm scamming congresspeople. 



Jon
-- 
Jon Stewart
stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx

"and dropping a barbell, he points to the sky, saying 'the sun's not 
yellow, it's chicken.'"

			-- Bob Dylan