Jack Schofield & Sean Dodson
What’s New
Apple is expected to unveil a portable and probably colourful Macintosh computer aimed at consumers at the MacWorld show in New York later this month (July 20 to 23).
The P1, which may be called the WebMate, is being made in Taiwan by Alpha Top, and is expected to start shipping in August, though an unconfirmed report has suggested further delays.
Apple’s interim CEO Steve Jobs killed the company’s last effort in this area – the curvaceous Newton-based eMate – and the new machine will fulfil his strategy of providing Macs in four basic categories: consumer desktop, consumer portable, business desktop and business portable.
Apple may also unveil an improved version of the iMac, code-named C2, with a 366 megahertz processor, 64 megabytes of memory and a 43cm screen.
Lookalike
Ever since the iMac came out, Taiwanese PC manufacturers have talked about producing lookalikes running Microsoft Windows 98.
Future Power, a Californian start-up, seems to have beaten them to it with its E-Power all-in-one machine, shown at the recent New York Expo computer exhibition.
The E-Power has a 400 megahertz Intel Celeron (Pentium II) chip, 64 megabytes of memory and a 6,4 gigabyte hard drive in a translucent coloured case. It looks like an iMac, but at $799 costs a third less. It even has a floppy disk drive. Check it out at .
Linux loses
It’s official: Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system really is better than the GNU/Linux clone of Unix, but not by as much as Microsoft would like you to believe.
In a five-day showdown conducted by PC Week Labs in the United States, the NT beat GNU/Linux in every test.
To take but one example, the NT Web server proved only 225% faster than GNU/Linux/Apache, not 400%.
The larger difference was claimed earlier this year following benchmark tests conducted independently by Mindcraft Inc but paid for by Microsoft. Linux fans cried foul and demanded a rematch.
For the PC Labs tests, the Linux supporters – represented by Red Hat, the leading GNU/Linux distributor – were able to make all the tweaks they could think of, but were unable to match NT even on low-end hardware.
In fact, a single-processor NT system performed as well as a four-processor Linux box, which is exactly the reverse of the Linux movement’s propaganda.
ENDS