Book Reviews


[Day Permalink] Wednesday, October 13, 2004

[Item Permalink]  -- Comment()
Apple Fires Back At Microsoft Over 'Closed' Comments: "There is a lot of customer choice happening today, it's just that Microsoft doesn't like the choices customers are making." By MacMinute (via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]


[Item Permalink] Reviewing the tempting iMac G5 -- Comment()
I have tested an 20" iMac G5 for five days now. The machine sits at the living room table at home, and works as a net terminal, iTunes jukebox, dvd player, and a gaming machine.

I'm pleased with the machine. There is hardly any noise at all from the machine, and the performance is rather good (except perhaps the video card could be a bit more powerful). The standard memory should be 512 MB. The USB, FireWire etc. connections should be in the front of the machine, not back. But perhaps this is a matter of style to Apple.

I tested the iMac G5 cpu with a Fortran code for solving linear equations with the conjugate gradient method. An 600 MHz iBook G3 took 7.7 s, a 1 GHz PowerBook G4 took 3.9 s, and the 1.8 GHz iMac G5 took 1.2 s. Not bad - and the Fortran compiler didn't use any G5 optimizations.

I'm tempted to replace my three-year-old iBook with the new iMac G5. But I'll wait for the next revision of either iBook or iMac.