good catch -- indeed, that was a goof. meant to write 66 but my fingers had other ideas. Sorry. But at any rate, I don't think the specific numbers are that important. The point was the new machine was computationally hundreds of times faster. But in actual use, it was slower in some areas that really matter, to the degree that even a young child noticed!
BTW, It's been a few years since I read it, but I believe this story is included in Abrash's book titled "Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book" since it's largely a compilation of his DDJ "Mode X" articles and a few others.

Yep, the early 486 with the clock-doubled processor. I had a DX2-80 *I think* (with a VESA local-bus video card so I could play Aces Of The Pacific in 256 color 800x600 mode -- woot!) and thought it was the cat's whiskers. Couldn't believe how fast it was compared to my lowly 33MHz machine @ work. And it only cost me $2300, what a great deal! And to think, now a $99 iPod Touch could run a PC emulator faster than that machine. That's serious progress.

Impressive and would be a huge improvement over the current state of things.

But then again, my 1Mhz Apple ][ could cold boot in just a couple seconds.Of course, loading Applesoft Basic from tape took an additional two minutes but Integer Basic was in the ROM.

Michael Abrash wrote a great article about this in Dr. Dobbs magazine in the 90s. His young daughter (5 years old?) asked him why he never used his "fast" computer. Abrash was using a state-of-the-art 266mhz DX2 powerhouse and couldn't figure out what she meant. She was referring to the old Vic-20 in the corner that would boot in just a few seconds. Windows 3.0 took several minutes to load. IIRC, the article was titled "perception is everything"

Write once. Pay everywhere.

Yet another reason why the newspaper business is bleeding money and descreasing subscriptions year after year after year. Kudos to the editors for attempting something different -- trying to match the product they sell to the market demand.

I don't believe these employees understand they are just that -- retained at the pleasure of their employer. If they wish to spout off with unpopular opinions without fear of retribution, they should have either been college professors or Supreme Court justices.

In the meantime, so long as someone else is paying them, they will do as they are told. Call the Waaaambulance.

Queue the "how many physicists does it take to change a nano lightbulb?" jokes...

Steve Jobs said it well: "Real artists ship."

It's a very entrepreneurial idea -- quit all the talking and hand-waving and actually ship something! There's not much value in developing great ideas that never get out of the lab.
As for the claim that neither innovates? Hogwash. Taking an idea and integrating it into a viable product IS innovation by definition -- it is something that has not been done before that point. Both MS and Apple innovate, to different degrees, which we can squabble about, ad infinitum. :) I would say MSFT is far better at marketing their ideas and capturing market share, while Apple is better at inventing. Others will have a different view.

But back to the original subject, I suspect Apple's desire for custom chips comes not from a desire to save power (there are already many viable low-power CPUs and chipsets available) but rather a desire to fight off Hackintosh clones (OSX running on non-apple hardware, such as the Dell mini 9 or generic desktop PCs). Technologically, there's no reason why this can't happen but one must consider that Apple's hardware sales are quite profitable and that share is worth protecting.

Imagine the horror if the monitor crashed -- A quite literal Blue Screen Of Death!

>>* Butt wiper

No, that's included. AT&T's billing office sends me six sheets or so every month.

Those Apple guys thought of everything!

modded down?

>>Why would you want spam filtering on ANY phone?
Maybe because I don't want to flick through 10 spams for every email?
Look, I can write a Bayesian classifier in a couple hundred lines of code. Trivial. Adding training is just a bit more work and it's not a matter of consuming some precious resource -- counting word frequency (the heart of the algorithm) is not exactly processor intensive and as for storage requirements for the corpus, that won't be much larger than an eBook.

But Apple won't allow a background task (so no proxy server), and they won't approve an app that replaced core functionality (so that rules out a "Mail" replacement app). I can only conclude that they are working on something themselves or are hopelessly naive about the frustrations we users suffer. So for now, I endure.

>>As for printing, how in demand is it for someone to plug in an electronic device that allows you to view the document already to print it to paper?

For all the same reasons as one might wish to print from a desktop or laptop system. At this point the iPhone is very close to replacing my need for a laptop. Occasionally I might like to print a contract, or a project plan, or a burndown chart for the project board. It's not like I'm asking for a magic pony here, just want the same functionality as my old Apple Newton had. (which could copy & paste, and print to a variety of inkjet and laser printers, even across a network, AND search all the system soups (data and metadata) from day one.)

Let me guess -- you work in engineering, not marketing?

I'll start the list:

* printing
* spam filtering on email ...

>>How about the hours that go into training one or many users in a company on using that new OS? Compatibility problems? Setting up specialized software?

Still probably cheaper than having your entire network (and all corporate data, financial plans, product designs, confidential data, HR information, payroll, etc.) owned by a botnet and copied to who-knows-where.

What is wrong is that doesn't tell the whole story because it fails to measure real-world performance except for one rare edge-case -- Max CPU duration.

It would be like automobile MPG being estimated based on full-throttle driving on a race track -- it doesn't mirror how the product is actually used. Instead we have city/highway ratings which attempt to mimic two use cases.

The difficulty with automobile engines is that they must operate efficiently across a variety of RPM ranges and trade-offs must be made to strike the best balance. If EPA tests were only at full throttle we'd soon see products tweaked for the test -- very, very efficient engines at high RPMs which are nearly unusable at lower speeds.

Unless they're in a server farm, PCs typically aren't run @ 100% except in short bursts. Most of the time, they're idling while the user reads a webpage or waits for an IM. Gaming is a bit of an exception in that it's more demanding. The idling of a CPU is an immensely important part of the power efficiency profile for a PC since it takes advantage of (frequent) opportunities to conserve, but your recommendation would ignore it.

>>This happens in every industry

This is a bit different from a breakfast cereal saying "now even tastier" or a soap promising "more suds!" The first is subjective (personal preference) but the second is objective -- it can be quantified and proven/disproven.

In this case with batteries, rather than taking an actual measurement of performance, the industry is building an estimate from a combination of measured behavior + a calculation based on a performance variable. It's no different than the automobile industry stating "EPA Estimated MPG city/highway" which is not based on a dynamometer test or actual performance measurement but instead is calculated based on the amount of CO2 which exits the exhaust pipe of the car! Is it any wonder, then, that hybrid cars which shut off their gasoline engine when stopped and at low speed/light acceleration, would give grossly inflated figures? Well, they did (and do), which explains why real-world MPG is often far less than this calculated (not even simulated) performance.
In short, they're both lying and it's obvious. Yet companies wonder why consumers are so cynical and therefore difficult to reach with advertising.

What is needed is real-world testing -- dynamometer ("rolling test track") testing for autos where the wind resistance, temperature, barometric pressure, etc. can all be carefully controlled. Similarly with computers, a pure performance-based measurement is needed which should account for idle time, network activity, etc. Just as an automobile is not tested at full-throttle for 3 hours, neither should a PC, but instead a variety of benchmarks (gaming, web browsing, spreadsheet, word processing, ???) could show performance figures for various activities.

In short, manufacturers, we want real numbers free of hype.