Blog entries on September 2005

• iMic for my Mac mini

  By Nuno Mariz, on 21 September 2005 @ 15:27 ∞
  macwtf
  

  I think that is very weird that Mac mini doesn't have a mic or a simple line-in interface, i had to wait for 15 days and pay for the iMic 53 €. For those who doesn't know what it is:

  The iMic universal audio adapter is a USB device that adds stereo input and output to your Mac or PC. Connect virtually any microphone or sound input device to your iBook, PowerBook, PowerMac or other Mac or PC with a USB port. Yes, iMic supports both Mic level and line level input. It also supports line level output for connecting speakers or an external recording device.

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• Apple's G5 versus x86, Mac OS X versus Linux

  By Nuno Mariz, on 2 September 2005 @ 14:59 ∞
  benchmarksmac
  

  I've found an interesting article comparing Apple's G5 versus x86 and Mac OS X versus Linux. Basically resumes to this:

  Workstation, yes; Server, no.
  
  The G5 is a gigantic improvement over the previous CPU in the PowerMac, the G4e. The G5 is one of the most superscalar CPUs ever, and has all the characteristics that could give Apple the edge, especially now that the clock speed race between AMD and Intel is over. However, there is still a lot of work to be done.
  
  The server performance of the Apple platform is, however, catastrophic. When we asked Apple for a reaction, they told us that some database vendors, Sybase and Oracle, have found a way around the threading problems. We'll try Sybase later, but frankly, we are very sceptical. The whole "multi-threaded Mach microkernel trapped inside a monolithic FreeBSD cocoon with several threading wrappers and coarse-grained threading access to the kernel", with a "backwards compatibility" millstone around its neck sounds like a bad fusion recipe for performance.
  
  Workstation apps will hardly mind, but the performance of server applications depends greatly on the threading, signalling and locking engine. I am no operating system expert, but with the data that we have today, I think that a PowerPC optimised Linux such as Yellow Dog is a better idea for the Xserve than Mac OS X server.

  No more mysteries:
  Apple's G5 versus x86, Mac OS X versus Linux Part One, Part Two
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