h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I just read in an APC mag that if you sit a G4 dual processor 850 mHz next to a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, the Mac will out perform the Pentium by 3 times on every day photoshop tasks.

I think that such a dramatic difference is because of the dual processors, and the fact that the G4 processor is specifically designed to speed graphic design processes, but it just goes to show - you can't always rely on just the speed rating!

(I can see why the Mac is an industry standard for graphics design...)

Last like most of this sort is mostly rubbish

received "wisdom" is a most unscientific way to proceed

There is no reason why Intel platforms should be and less powerful than the RISC (reduced instruction set) CPUs.

However you have to be awaare Intel have for years been optimising their sales strategy to "at a price" processors which have nothing in common with the price of G4 style CPUs. If you take the professional line of CPUs from Intel which are based on the Xeon chip you will find they are more expensive, much more powerful and far more scaleable than any RISC Mac system (up to 8 or more CPUs)
With it comes all the flexibility of the i386 architecture including the 64 bit Itanium which is already running 64 bits systems successfully under Linux today.

What about networking Appleis light years behind in flexibility and speed.

Apple superiority? It's a load of hype, it ceased to exist around 4-5 years ago with the arrival of NT and OSX is a very badly engineered imitation of Unix with MASSIVE compatibility issues and horrible legacy kludges.

I can't understand the bias shown by the reported for Macs, and he has obviously never tried to install a reliable Linux system else he would never reccommend Red HAT which is complete junk since about 2 years ago when they quoted on the NYSE.

Hmmm

How to inform without informing,- BBC guides again!

Have you used a Mac for more than 5 minutes?! This line especially has me rolling on the floor:
"What about networking Appleis light years behind in flexibility and speed."
In truth Apple introduced peer-to-peer networking that required NO configuration on the users part (true plug-and-play) back in 1985, including shared printers and this was part of the reason they became the default machine in the publishing world. It took microsoft a few more years, and then you needed to get a special version of windows (Windows for Workgroups) and it was a mess to set up. Then microsoft missed the Internet (Bill Gates readily admits this) and had to play catch-up by licensing the code for Internet Explorer from NCSA Mosaic (look at the copyright if you don't believe me), at a time when the nearly 30% of the computers on the net were Macs (and PCs less than 10%) - the disparity was striking. And you can change your network settings on a Mac *without* restarting !
"OSX is a very badly engineered imitation of Unix " OS X *is* Unix (FreeBSD) with a graphical layer added on top. You can install anything that compiles on FreeBSD with little or no trouble, including XFree86 which runs simultaneously with Apple's GUI (I'm doing that now). Plus Apple rewrote the older OS 9 as a processs in Unix, so you can continue to use older apps. I can still run a word processor that has not been updated since 1991, with no tweaking of the system! Do you remember the laughs and criticism that Gates received when he said NT was the "most unix-y unix out there?" !
But you do have some good points - the "processor megahertz" speed wars can be tilted by the type of test done. The Pentium is better at some tasks than the PowerPC, and the PowerPC is better at other tasks than the Pentium. They are different designs, optimized for different purposes. Still, RISC (PowerPC and others) is a more advanced design than CISC (Pentium), and you can't really bring Xeon into it unless you want to bring in the IBM PowerPC chips that run their servers. It all goes to the point that "megahertz" alone is a nearly meaningless measure when comparing different chip designs, or even different models of the same design.