The PowerPC G4 Is a Lie

At the heart of the current high-end Macs, routers, and switches is the PowerPC G4, which is what Apple and Motorola claim to be their fourth generation CPU that is the result of the three-way Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance, which has been designing and fabbing various PowerPC chips since 1991.

I contend that “G4” is a blatant misnomer by Apple and Motorola to spur sales and compete with Intel's Pentium 4 product and nomenclature. Below I'll give some historical background, technical information, and plain facts that support my claim that the PowerPC G4 is really a second-generation processor, and the broader notion that the PowerPC family has not evolved significantly since 1995, something Apple and Motorola propaganda has repeatedly accused the competition of in recent years. But first, the background.

…Unban Me One More Time

Unban me, ban me
How am I supposed to troll
Slashdot? My subnet is denied there
Unban me, ban me
I shouldn't have to go
And use a fucking proxie
Show me how to troll freely
Tell me, I really wanna troll now,
Oh because

Not trolling Slashdot is killing me (and I)
I must confess I still believe (still believe)
When I'm not trolling I lose my mind
Give me a sign
Please unban me one more time

Unban me, ban me
The reason i troll is you
IP bans got me gagg-ed
Oh Taco baby
there's nothing that i wouldn't do
that's not the way i planned it
Show me how you want it to be
Tell me Taco cause i need to troll now
Oh because

Not trolling Slashdot is killing me (and I)
I must confess I still believe (still believe)
When I'm not trolling I lose my mind
Give me a sign
Please unban me one more time

Unban me, Taco, how am i suposed to troll
Jamie McCarthy, you shouldn't censorware SLASH code
I must confess, that my trollishness
is killing me now
Don't you know I still believe
that you are so queer
So give me a break
Fuck'n unban me one more time

Not trolling Slashdot is killing me (and I)
I must confess I still believe (still believe)
When I'm not trolling I lose my mind
Give me a sign
Please unban me one more time

RMS Goes to the Zoo

With a twinkle in his eye and a skip in his step, RMS slammed his sky-blue Chevette's rusted-out car door and turned on heel toward the MIT Zoo entrance. Today was a Sunday, and RMS had decided the daily stresses of Free Software, the GPL, and his crazy drug-smoking habits could go away for just one afternoon while he enjoyed the zoo.

"That'll be twenty-five dollars, sir," the lady at the admission booth said glumly. She looked at RMS expectantly.

"I was expecting this zoo to be Free," RMS stated loudly, eyes darting around to gauge onlookers' reactions. There were none: RMS's capital F had went unnoticed. "Can you ensure me that this money will not help fund –"

The admissions lady cut him off. "Twenty-five dollars, or twenty bucks with a Bawls can," the lady cut in.

With a grumble and shake of his beard, RMS handed over twenty five of his hard-earned dollars. Considering that the GPL works to unemploy programmers, one must wonder where this money came from.

By evening, RMS found himself in front of the penguin exhibit. He felt himself start to sweat, which would have been no surprise—his thick, full, grizzly beard was worth a thousand down comforters—except that he was wearing only a pair of nylon biking shorts and a travel pack around his waist. He stared at his hands. What was wrong?

"Awk" a nearby bird squawked. RMS wheeled in the direction the screech had come from. He was met with the steely, unfeeling stares of a penguin. "Awk! Ooooh God, the penguin said awk... Lord, lord lord, it's GNU/Linux. The penguin is Tux!!!" RMS blurted out. He felt dizzy, and cold sweat now washed over his brittle, hairy chest. He looked this way and that. From nearby a bird again squawked.

"Awk! Awk! Awwwwk!!!"

RMS ran as fast as his atrophied hippie-programmer legs could carry him, right through a gate and into an exhibit. He realized what he had done, and before he could turn around, he heard a low, ominous sound. Like the Devil's riding mower.

"Moooooooooooooooo!"

RMS gasped and darted his eyes around him as he stood deathly still.

"MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

RMS was standing in the Gnu section, and it seemed these bull yaks were in rut and ready to mate with the first hairy thing with a hole in its center they found. Bad luck for RMS and his beard. Just then he felt cloven hooves push him down, and the world became fuzzy. RMS blacked out and remembered no more.

The Open Source Mullet

At the place where I work, there's an Open Source zealot with a mullet, the most annoying hybrid of human ever to exist.

He loves to throw around technical terms:

“Yeah, the SPARC's 64-bit!” he exclaimed to the temp we just hired.

Oh, is it, Open Source Mullet? I always thought that SPARC was 32-bit, and that UltraSPARC was 64 bit. But I don't use Linux, so I wouldn't know.

“The AS/400's a pretty open systems,” he would mouth-shit.

What the fuck!?

So I coyly asked, “How are they open?”

Man, his fucking answer made me want to rip his head off and fuck his throat.

“Well, now that Linux runs on it…” and I heard no more.

I almost wanted to cry. And he went on about how the “major players” are all involved in Open Source, and how Open Source is this and that and blah blah blah… Lord, why did he have to work here?

It had come to the point where he would spout off about Linux with all of his buzzwords every time someone asked him a question, regardless of what it was.

For example, my boss had asked me if I had Photoshop for my Mac for a web project, and lo and behold, here comes Open Source Mullet with comments about how the Gimp is just as good, etc.

I DON'T FUCKING CARE!

DOES IT RUN ON MY MAC?

CAN I INSTALL IT WITH A FEW CLICKS, OR DO I HAVE TO DOWNLOAD A MILLION LIBRARIES AND COMPILE ITS FUCKING SOURCE CODE FIRST!?

CAN IT DO EVERYTHING PHOTOSHOP DOES!?

I DON'T THINK SO, OPEN SOURCE MULLET, AND I HAVE A JOB TO DO!!!

Anyway, I tossed him my lethal grenade: “My new iBook runs Mac OS X.”

Open Source Mullet flared his nostrils.

“It's Unix. A BSD userland with an optimized Apple kernel. And Apple's GUI and apps on top. Sure as hell don't need Linux on my Mac now.”

Open Source Mullet half growled. “When the hell did that come out?”

Man, for being such an Open Source advocate, he sure hadn't paid attention to the Apple Public Source License, an official Open Source license. Could he be nothing more than a Linux mark?

Well, to end my frustration with him for that day, he started having problems with his Oracle8i install. Thankfully that tied him up for the rest of the day.

I could still hear him hissing “fuckin' bitch” under his breath every few minutes though, and something about mySQL being a lot simpler to configure.

Oh well. I had made it through another day without murdering the Open Source Mullet.

Surprised by Cock

A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least in theory) absurdly gay.

I was at my machine, my 386 with 4 megs of RAM running Linux, masturbating to pictures of RMS, when I got an email congratulating me on the success of VA Linux Systems IPO. I was working on my latest small project -- a clever little text parser that takes input from the user and puts it in a little cartoon-style word balloon coming out of a giant, erect ASCII penis's bulging head! Hahaha! It's called COCKSAY.

Another Apology

I began my notorious career in trolling because I thought it would be fun to get reactions out of the regular Slashdot readers. In attempting to do so I've posted trick links to corpses, written paranoid, homoerotic articles on members of the software community, and in general made a pest out of myself by violating others' good taste and personal values.