About This Mac...
by Martin Gonzalvez
for PCWorld Philippines September 2003 issue
July 18, 2003
No G5 in My Near Future
As of this writing, most diehard Mac users are salivating over the announcements made by Apple at the recently-concluded Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, where the big news was the impending release of Power Macs sporting the G5 chip. Apple made a big deal about how the the G5 makes Apple once again the world's fastest personal computer -- first with a 64-bit processor, first to break the four gigabyte RAM barrier (maximum 8Gb RAM), and a one gigahertz frontside bus architecture for data-pushing power to burn. Apple has released test results (
http://www.apple.com/powermac/ ) showing how the G5 toasted a 3.06Ghz Xeon and a 3Ghz Pentium 4. The intended result is to make our pulses race a little faster and hold our heads a little higher, knowing that Macs are once again the fastest computers in the world.
I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but at this point in my personal and professional life, news of the G5 leaves me ice cold. This is one hobby horse that I simply don't have the money to ride. The base model G5 will reportedly debut at a $1999 (about PhP104,000) price point, which is pretty good as high-end computers go. But for someone like me, who's been agonizing for the past six months if I should shell out a measly $200 (PhP10,000) for a G3 upgrade card for my eight-year-old PowerMac 5500/225, that amount is as out of reach as the possibility of my getting a date with Heidi Klum (
http://www.km02.com/hklum/ ).
(Heidi, in the fantastically unlikely event that you are actually reading this -- sorry, but I'll take a free G5 over a date with you any day. This proves beyond any doubt that I am an incorrigible geek, for only a geek would choose a computer, even the world's fastest one, over a date with a supermodel.)
How could I wish for a G5 -- I don't even own a G4! The highest-end Mac at my personal disposal is an 800Mhz iBook G3, and I only acquired that because the company that I work for purchased it for my use. As far as Macs bought with my own money go, it's the one that I'm typing this article on: my trusty graphite iMac 600Mhz that I purchased in July 2001, almost exactly two years ago.
Let's switch topics suddenly at this point; I promise that everything will dovetail together a few paragraphs from now. Last night I downloaded the long-awaited Mac OS X version of America's Army, the online military simulation game created and provided for free by the U.S. Army, which has to date been enjoyed over 1.85 million Windows PC players and has been named Editor's Choice by Computer Gaming World.
Yes, you read that right -- if you haven't already heard by now, the game is freeware. Being both constantly struggling to make ends meet, and a lifelong cheapskate, the letters "F-R-E-E" naturally piqued my interest in this game, even if I've never been a big fan of ultra-real military simulations typified by games such as Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon (If you're interested, you can get your copy of America's Army for Windows or Mac OS X at
http://americasarmy.com/ ).
So, I am now in possession of an actual Mac versions of a critically-acclaimed, freeware game -- it's all good, right?
Wrong.
I can't play America's Army on my 600Mhz iMac. Even though it has hundreds of gigs of hard disk space, and packs 384mb of RAM (more than enough), America's Army requires a minimum 700Mhz G3 processor, and recommends a 1.2ghz G3 processor. The game also recommends a much beefier video card than the non-upgradeable ATI Rage Pro 2 (16Mb VRAM) that shipped with my iMac -- preferably an NVIDIA GeForce 2/4 or ATI Radeon 7500/8500.
My iMac is only two years old, and already it is hopelessly obsolete, not having the juice to run a currently shipping game. Moore's Law (
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/Moores_Law.html ), the axiom that processing power will double every 18 months, triumphs once again. And those of us who simply don't have the means to keep up with the inexorable march of technological progress get left behind in the dust of slowly decaying silicon chips.
Another point: which of the most common desktop applications out there require this constantly doubling processor power? Not Microsoft Office -- although it is a resource hog, Office XP will run just fine even now on an eight-year-old Pentium-II 450Mhz box. Not Adobe Photoshop -- version 7.0 runs like a champ on my two-year-old iMac. It seems quite clear to me that only one class of desktop applications requires and makes full use of these unending advances in processor speed and power: games. In a real sense, the computer game industry is the main force driving the runaway train of doubling processor power, governed by Moore's Law. Computer games notched up an impressive US$1.4 billion in US sales last year, according to the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA,
http://www.idsa.com ). When you include console game sales, the game industry as a whole accounted for US$6.9 billion of Us entertainment sales in 2002, a figure that rivals, and by some accounts exceeds, the revenues of the US film industry. Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt are getting stiff competition from the likes of Sam Fisher, protagonist of Ubi Soft's immensely popular game Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (
http://www.splintercell.com/us/ ), and Tommy Vercetti, the "hero" of Rockstar Games' ultra-violent Grand Theft Auto 3: Vice City (
http://www.rockstargames.com/vicecity/ ). The game industry grew eight percent from 2001 sales figures, and with over 60 percent of Americans now playing games, this robust growth is expected to continue.
In my opinion, game developers are taking the easy way out by equating "progress" with "better graphics" and "more powerful 3-D engines," that simultaneously reinforce and depend on Moore's Law processor doubling for their continued success. While today's games certainly look better than ever before, gameplay innovation has come to a virtual standstill, and game genres have undergone a brutal Darwinian selection process that has narrowed them down to the half-dozen or so that make the easiest money. To today's game-playing kids, the term "game" virtually almost automatically means a first-person shooter like Quake III, a military simulation like Ghost Recon, or a real-time strategy game like Warcraft III. When an intelligent, non-violent, genre-defining game like Sid Meier's Civilization III puts up decent sales numbers, it seems more like a happy accident, the exception rather than the rule. Rather than always pushing for ever more realistic graphics and perennially greater system requirements, I think game developers should look toward doing more with less, with increasing creativity rather than frame rates.
But the way things are going, people like me who can't afford to spend $2,000 (PhP 100,000) every two years for the latest and greatest computer hardware are just going to get left further behind.
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Just because I write a Macintosh column, it doesn't mean that I'm a complete Mac bigot. I'll be the first to admit that Windows PC's are, in fact, better then the Mac at certain things -- like downloading music and video clips from the internet. Peer-to-peer file sharing is a much more highly evolved art form on the Wintel side than on the Mac side, where the choice of P2P clients is slim. That's why I was actually glad a couple of months ago when a friend was about to throw out a 200 Mhz Compaq Presario, and when I asked for it decided to give it to me instead. A 200 Mhz Windows PC may be hopelessly obsolete in this age of Pentium chips running at clock speeds in excess of three gigahertz, but it can still connect to the net, and it can still run Kazaa -- which is about all that I use it for. It may have rolled off the assembly line in 1996, but my "junk" Compaq works very well for P2P.
However, in comparing my P2P experiences on both platforms, I couldn't help but notice something. Anyone who's spent a lot of time downloading files using P2P apps is (or should be) aware that part and parcel of the P2P scene is getting a whole lot of adware and spyware installed on your computer, in most cases without your permission or knowledge. Kazaa, for example, buries certain files deep within the the WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 subdirectory whose only purpose is to pull ads from the net, automatically launch Internet Explorer, and display these ads on your desktop. As adware and spyware have become more prevalent, other utilities have sprung up to detect and remove these pieces of unwelcome software from our hard drives. The one I use to clean up my Wintel box and those of my clients after prolonged P2P sessions is Ad-Aware (
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware ). When I run it on Wintel boxes, Ad-Aware inevitably finds and deletes dozens of pieces of adware and spyware. One client -- who has two teenaged kids in the house, downloading their music and movies on the family Windows PC -- was unfortunate enough to find over 300 files on her computer, identified by Ad-Aware as adware and spyware.
By comparison, when I ran the MacScan (
http://macscan.securemac.com/about.html ), the Mac equivalent of Ad-Aware on my iMac, it found nothing. Zero. Nada. This despite the fact that I've been using my iMac to connect to the Gnutella network 2-3 times a week for the past six months. I wonder why spyware and adware are so prevalent on one platform, and completely absent on another.
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Linear Mode
