In the two (or three?) weeks I've had it I've gotten no value from it. Yes, it's fast. Can I prove this? No, other than telling you Unreal Tournament 2003 plays pretty well on it.

If you believe in the depreciation fairy (like I do), then you know that every second that machine lays idle is money down the drain. Using straight line depreciation, that machine costs me .00003 cents every second of every day if I get any value out of it or not!

There are of course, things much further and far more evil down the every-second-of-every-day reasoning trail. I've been there.

By the way, so I've been playing UT 2003 with it a little, and was finding that it was hanging about every 5 minutes with that game. Tried another, and sure enough, it started to do the same thing. Wiped the drive, reinstalled, and now crashes are no longer. Had this machine decided to hang every five minutes when I was using it for production I would have been massively angry. For that much money, that machine should never crash - especially since we have OS X's protected memory and other buzzwords. So a bit of good did come out of playing some games.

What have I been doing with the G5, production wise? Pyobjc research. This is ironic, because, since Python is a semi-interpreted language (there is no compile phase per say, but code is translated into bytecode at some point in time) researching pybojc on the G5 should be no faster than researching it on the 400Mhz G4

I have not tried any of my bigger (ie: C++ based) projects on the G5, and I probably won't for at least another week (I'll probably be running bug control this week, in an Applescript Studio based application which should also compile as fast on the Powerbook as it does on the G5.)

Maybe I purchased that thing with some big beer goggles on. "Oh my, it's so pretty and so fast, and I have the money, so let's throw caution and wisdom to the wind and buy this sucker." This is very possible (although I have reasons for purchasing it - like distributed builds with Xcode, an environment I don't use much).

It may also be that I very rarely buy anything really nice for myself. About four or five months ago I went up to the mall to buy pants and stuff. I walked out of the mall maybe $100 poorer, but wondering at the same time, "Why did I need these pants? Didn't I have pants before? Where are they now?"

So, when I ask my mind to justify this huge purchase I made, it can't, because it can barely justify heating my apartment during non-work hours. My brain has no idea why I spent that much money.

Personally, I'm beginning to think it has a point.