Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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Tal G in Jerusalem
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Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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10/6/2003 -  10/8/2003
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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Tuesday, June 24, 2003
15:03 - Whoops, better cancel my order http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/	(top)
It would seem, from this carefully self-labeled non-biased source, that the G5 benchmarks were doctored and Apple rigged the Veritest setup. You know, it seems odd to me that Apple would publish test results that show their machines to be slower than the comparable PCs at certain things (integer operations on single-CPU machines, for one), if such results were the product of book-cookery. Wouldn't they cook things sufficiently so that they'd win on everything? One possibility is that the G5s suck so much that Apple couldn't even cripple the P4s and Xeons enough so that the G5 would outperform them across the board. (Another is that they're trying to carefully craft a result set that's made plausible by a few selected failures.) But I'm reminded irresistibly of another argument we're hearing lately: The fact that we haven't found any WMDs lately means that Bush lied about their existence. Whereas an administration determined to sell a lie would surely plant some WMDs after the fact, wouldn't it? If they're disingenuous enough to lie about there being WMDs in order to fight the war, then surely they wouldn't be above planting some afterwards so they could justify it ex post facto? Especially because they would have known that if the enterprise were based on a lie, then someone would eventually find out there wasn't anything there to begin with? Same goes for the G5s. Jobs knows as well as anybody that people will always fact-check the benchmarks. He's been burned on such things numerous times already-- sometimes deservedly so, sometimes not (the latter case often the result of people so determined to catch Apple in a lie that they'll flat-out refuse to give them the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous scenario)-- that he would surely have expected that any blatant lying about the G5s' speed would be wrung out within days, if not hours. Why would he do such a thing? Is he spectacularly stupid, or just plain evil? Or is there more to the story than even the there's-more-to-the-story expos�s would have us believe? I'm not saying I disbelieve that the SPEC benchmarks were fixed. Somehow, though, I have a hard time swallowing that Jobs hoodwinked or bribed the CEOs of Adobe, Emagic, Wolfram, and so forth into giddily endorsing the G5. I like to think that people like that will have their own guys do their own independent analysis. Adobe's VP, for instance, in the keynote itself mentioned that within the company, his engineers were all over the G5-- and even one particularly skeptical Wintel guy was now a total convert, after having seen what it can do on his own recognizance. Apple doesn't make claims that are blatantly, factually false. No, hear me out: Apple often makes claims that can be seen as misleading, depending on circumstances, politics, and so on. Their claims of superiority in speed over the years certainly fall into that category; there have always been certain things that Macs have excelled at, and if you allow a couple of asterisks and footnotes, Apple's claims can be seen to be correct. However, on claims such as "The world's first 17-inch notebook", skepticism or no skepticism, Apple's not stupid enough to make that claim unless they know it to be factually true. Real-world usefulness is king, not SPEC benchmarks; and the preponderance of multi-sourced evidence suggests to me that the G5s at the very least are a match for top-end P4/Xeon machines. And the G5 is at the beginning of its development cycle, not the end; "this architecture has legs," Jobs said yesterday. And the 980 will be coming in six months to a year anyway. IBM is behind this project wholeheartedly. The upshot? Two things: 1) relative to my older Mac, the new G5 is as much faster as claimed; and 2) relative to contemporary PCs, it's in the same Little-League ballpark, to the extent that when people tell me Macs suck dog balls, I can shake my head and walk away secure in the knowledge that it's based on sour grapes and good old-fashioned pettiness rather than factual numbers or real-world experience. And that's plenty good enough for me, at least five friends, and the ton of other potential buyers who currently have the Apple Store's phone lines swamped with orders. I doubt that I'll be disappointed when mine arrives; if I am, I'll say so. But, to use a known infuriating unassailable piece of nyah-nyah logic, the only criterion that matters to me is my own satisfaction. If I'm satisfied, then the rest is gravy. UPDATE: In any case, the Slashdot thread appears to be populated largely with people who find Apple's spec practices to be defensible; I'm not sure I want to go so far as to say they tear the challenger's arguments to shreds (there are almost 1500 comments to read through), but this is clearly not a cut-and-dried case.