Here We Go Again!

[mac57mac57]

I am either blessed or cursed - you decide which - but I have just come into another Power Mac G5 Quad with a dead cooling system, hence at a very reasonable price. I therefore now have three G5 Quads! Sheesh!

At this point, air cooling seems too easy, so I decided to overhaul this "new" system's LCS, applying everything I have learned to date about LCS restoration. There have been a few innovations along the way, chiefly the use of heat to heat shrink the cooling loop hoses onto their barbs, and to accomplish smoother curves in the hoses where they are needed. The heat source in this case has been a long nosed lighter, of the sort used to light a grill or a wood fire.

I have also used heat to fit the hoses onto new metal T-connectors for the two places in the loop where they are needed.

I tore down the old loop completely and cleaned EVERYTHING, including loading the radiator with a 50/50 mix of vinegar and distilled water, leaving it over night and then flushing it with lots of fresh clean distilled water this AM. I also tore down the CPU cooling pads completely and thoroughly cleaned each part, particularly the microchannel pieces. All of this was incredibly gratifying: the microchannels were almost completely blocked with gunk, and the stuff that came out of the radiator... sheesh!! It was dirty!

I then rebuilt the cooling blocks, reassembled them into the LCS and built the new loop with clear transparent hosing, paying particular attention to achieving the least possible narrowing of the hosing as it curved left and right.

I am upgrading my LCS A-Z servicing guide with new information as I go, so that nothing is lost.

Now I wait. I do not have enough coolant left to recharge the new loop, and have ordered some more. Regrettably, it doesn't arrive for another five days. So... this project goes on hold until it arrives.

 

[Doq]

In what magical place do you reside where you can get THREE Quads for reasonable prices?

 

[mac57mac57]

I *know* ...it does feel pretty magical!

I think the bottom line is that I author and run multiple well regarded vintage Mac and retro-computing web sites and as awareness of them grows, more and more people are "coming out of the woodwork" and offering me things, knowing that they are going to "a good home" ... that is my guess anyway.

 

[jktwice]

In what magical place do you reside where you can get THREE Quads for reasonable prices?

Depends on what is considered a reasonable price. Quads are becoming harder and harder to find in the wild. I got insanely lucky to pay even $80 for mine and that thing had a damn near dead GPU!

I think any user shouldn't be paying more than $150 for one of these working, and more than $50 for a unit with known problems. It is expensive to fix these and get them running again.

 

[mac57mac57]

Interesting perspective @jktwice, but I suspect that you are undervaluing this whole class of machines.

I "shop" in two main places, eBay and FB Marketplace, and in my experience, the starting price for a working Quad is typically in the $300+ range (when you can find them at all), with some folks laughably asking as much as $1,000 or $1,200 if they feel their machine is unique in some way.

MOST working vintage Macs, regardless of whether they are G5s or not, tend to be listed in the $300'ish area. With this in mind, I think a working Quad for $150 would be more than just "reasonable".

 

[jktwice]

Interesting perspective @jktwice, but I suspect that you are undervaluing this whole class of machines.

I "shop" in two main places, eBay and FB Marketplace, and in my experience, the starting price for a working Quad is typically in the $300+ range (when you can find them at all), with some folks laughably asking as much as $1,000 or $1,200 if they feel their machine is unique in some way.

MOST working vintage Macs, regardless of whether they are G5s or not, tend to be listed in the $300'ish area. With this in mind, I think a working Quad for $150 would be more than just "reasonable".

I guess what I think is reasonable is not what others think.

When you see Mac Pros going for $100-$200 in the area it makes me really think what a G5 Quad is worth. They were only produced for that one year though.

I got lucky getting mine for sure. It was in pretty decent condition, just had a bad gpu

 

[bkmoore773]

I just sold my Quad to a collector for $50. It boots but then overheats, and I just no longer have the time or desire to rebuild and troubleshoot an LCS. Otherwise the Quad is in very good condition, never been dropped, etc. I wish him luck. I only asked $50 for it because I felt the person I was selling it to was serious about repairing it, either as a LCS or modding it for air cooling. I told him, "For you $50 if you repair it. If you just want to rip the guts out and harvest the case for a PC build, then $500."

 

[mac57mac57]

When you see Mac Pros going for $100-$200 in the area it makes me really think what a G5 Quad is worth. They were only produced for that one year though.

I think that this is the point. The Quad was the last and the fastest of the PowerPC line. This is not just another Mac... the last and the fastest. That makes it worth more, in the same way that a Quadra 840AV is worth more than all other 68K Macs, with the possible exception of the Macintosh IIfx.

 

[Doq]

I think any user shouldn't be paying more than $150 for one of these working, and more than $50 for a unit with known problems. It is expensive to fix these and get them running again.

This is probably fine. I got mine for $135 before shipping and even that was a risk because the only thing I knew about it was that it was an A1117, so there was a probable chance it would be a Dual instead, but the risk paid off.

I think that this is the point. The Quad was the last and the fastest of the PowerPC line. This is not just another Mac... the last and the fastest. That makes it worth more, in the same way that a Quadra 840AV is worth more than all other 68K Macs, with the possible exception of the Macintosh IIfx.

This comparison intrigues me because as far as I'm aware the last 68K Mac is the PowerBook 190, which is highly not sought after and very not the fastest.

sidebar: all of the 190s ship with a later stepping of the MC68LC040 which fixes a bug in the floating point emulator, making the 190 the only Mac that both has an LC040 and can run NetBSD

 

[mac57mac57]

This comparison intrigues me because as far as I'm aware the last 68K Mac is the PowerBook 190, which is highly not sought after and very not the fastest

Agreed! But... the Quadra 840AV was the fastest 68040-based Mac Apple ever produced (40 MHz), AND... you can even overclock it (slightly). I usually mention it in the same breath as the Macintosh IIfx, which was the fastest 68030-based Mac that Apple ever produced (also 40 MHz ). The Mac IIfx is even more special, in that it one of a handful of Macs that run Apple's A/UX, their variant of AT&T unix at the time.

Fully operational instances of both machines (Quadra 840AV and Mac IIfx) are now quite rare, and "rare" drives up prices. This is increasingly true of the G5 Quad as well and it will only get more and more true as the years pile on.

 

[mac57mac57]

While we discuss back and forth the price and capabilities of our G5s, we need to remember how lucky we are. We are lucky enough to be living in the fading light of the last dying embers of the G5 "fire". These machines can still do ... well ... pretty much everything, even 20 years after the last one rolled off the assembly line.

Ten years from now, I suspect that this will no longer be the case, but for now, it is a reflection of what beasts of machines these were.

It is also a reflection of how clever people like @thewireless and @z970 are - these people breathed new life into these struggling machines with their optimized software. Thanks to them, we can continue to do useful work on these venerable boxes. Thanks guys!

 

[eyoungren]

While we discuss back and forth the price and capabilities of our G5s, we need to remember how lucky we are. We are lucky enough to be living in the fading light of the last dying embers of the G5 "fire". These machines can still do ... well ... pretty much everything, even 20 years after the last one rolled off the assembly line.

Ten years from now, I suspect that this will no longer be the case, but for now, it is a reflection of what beasts of machines these were.

Things worked out differently for me in the spring of 2020. Quite possibly it's a different environment now, but at that time I was discovering that I had reached the limits of all my workarounds. My web browser was no longer cutting it either.

To be fair, a lot of it was designed to work with my iPhone, which at that time was still jailbroken on iOS 9.0.1. But old JB tweaks and ways of doing things were also failing on my iPhone. Plus, I also had a work-issued MBP, that even though it was running High Sierra, was still viable with some Apple services I wanted to use. As much as I loved being able to use jailbreaking to get my Quad to use iMessage (through a Fluid app), things were starting to break.

There was other stuff (such as finally moving to give up on Indesign CS4 and start using later versions) as well that I wanted to do that was only in the realm of Intel Macs at the time. So, for $250 I got a MacPro 4,1, specifically because I could upgrade it to a 5,1 and move on to later versions of MacOS which would then give me what I wanted.

I totally understand the nostalgia though. It's one of the reasons I hung on to my own Quad for so long. And I am not here to be on the opposite side of an argument I've long had with others about PowerPC Macs. I'm glad these old Macs are still useful (I still use my 17" PowerBook G4), I just no longer have a purpose for most of them. The one purpose I did have, which I could and still can legit stand on, is writing/design. Old versions of Word, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop. etc still work and can do the same job. My problem is I decided I wanted to work in newer versions.

Another part of that is that I always try and be roughly equivalent in software/hardware to what I am using in my current job. And in 2020, there was absolutely no way my Quad was going to run QuarkXPress 2016 and Adobe CC20.

 

[mac57mac57]

Efficient software, people, think efficient software! This is a gospel I will preach until the day they plant me 6 feet under.

The late 2005 Power Mac G5s, Dual or Quad, are absolute monsters of computing capacity. The fact that they have been sidelined by the software of today tells me just how insufficient and wasteful of CPU/GPU cycles that software really is....

...layers and layers and layers of useless junk piled one on top of the other until the poor CPU just can't handle the demand any more... and then THAT awful mess gets bundled into a Kubernetes container and run inside another abstracted environment, which itself can be bundled into another container, and so on. You get the picture... itis all a HUGE waste of resources.

Nostalgia aside, just look at what @thewireless (Aquafox) and @z970 (Sorbet Leopard, SL_PPC) have been able to accomplish when they start to cut some of the fat out of the software ... suddenly my "old" G5s start to sparkle again, able to do meaningful real world work once more.

Honestly, per an earlier post of mine, I have "promoted" my G5 Quad to my main desk, and do a large amount of real world work on it. I use my Mac Studio these days only for the things the Quad cannot reasonably accomplish.

This has always been the point. I did not do all that work, and endure all the aggravation and expense required to restore my Quads just because of vintage computing nostalgia (although that does help!). I spent all that time, effort and money because I firmly believe that my G5s are incredible machines that I can use for real work, for a long time to come. It doesn't hurt that I like each ensuing release of macOS less and less, and prefer the older, simpler, faster and cleaner GUIs of Leopard and Tiger.

There is another benefit to this too, quite aside from speed and a cleaner GUI.... security! Time has moved on, and there are not a lot of "bad guys" targeting malware to Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard anymore. As a result, all three OSs are incredibly safe environments to work in these days. Even "back in the day", they were way, way safer than the Windows of the time.

The "bad guys" rely on volume: if only a tiny percentage of users click their malicious links, those links must be targeted to the highest volume platforms. Tiger, (Sorbet) Leopard and Snow Leopard are absolutely NOT high volume platforms anymore, and are thus pretty much outside of the hackers realm. Using these platforms for daily work is rather like "hiding in plain sight". There you are, and they could target you, but the return is too low, so they leave you alone.

Safety, efficiency and nostalgia all rolled into one. It all adds up to a superior computing experience.

...efficient software, people, think efficient software! This is a gospel I will preach until the day they plant me 6 feet under

 

[ToniCH]

I also tore down the CPU cooling pads completely and thoroughly cleaned each part, particularly the microchannel pieces. All of this was incredibly gratifying: the microchannels were almost completely blocked with gunk, and the stuff that came out of the radiator... sheesh!! It was dirty!

I then rebuilt the cooling blocks, reassembled them into the LCS and built the new loop with clear transparent hosing, paying particular attention to achieving the least possible narrowing of the hosing as it curved left and right.

Do the cooling blocks have O-rings in them? If they do did you replace them and if yes with what?

Ps. I have 2 Quads. First one I paid with couple of hours of Mac-support. Second one was 40€ 20€ with a rough case.

 

[mac57mac57]

Do the cooling blocks have O-rings in them? If they do did you replace them and if yes with what?

Yes they do. There are two per cooling block, one inner and one outer. I examined both carefully, but as they were both in excellent shape, I just reused them.

 

[ToniCH]

Yes they do. There are two per cooling block, one inner and one outer. I examined both carefully, but as they were both in excellent shape, I just reused them.

Ok, in case they are not ok - do anybody know what size they are?

 

[mac57mac57]

Ps. I have 2 Quads. First one I paid with couple of hours of Mac-support. Second one was 40€ with a rough case

This is the key... the G5 cases seem to take quite a beating over the years. Ones with beat up cases sell for a LOT less than those with "cleaner" cases.

Just out of curiosity, how long ago did you get these two Quads?

BTW, no, I do not know what size the O-rings are. Does anyone else know?

 

[ToniCH]

Just out of curiosity, how long ago did you get these two Quads?

Couple of years ago.

Oh, sorry - just checked. The second G5 Quad was only 20€!

 

[eyoungren]

Efficient software, people, think efficient software! This is a gospel I will preach until the day they plant me 6 feet under.

The late 2005 Power Mac G5s, Dual or Quad, are absolute monsters of computing capacity. The fact that they have been sidelined by the software of today tells me just how insufficient and wasteful of CPU/GPU cycles that software really is....

...layers and layers and layers of useless junk piled one on top of the other until the poor CPU just can't handle the demand any more... and then THAT awful mess gets bundled into a Kubernetes container and run inside another abstracted environment, which itself can be bundled into another container, and so on. You get the picture... itis all a HUGE waste of resources.

Nostalgia aside, just look at what @thewireless (Aquafox) and @z970 (Sorbet Leopard, SL_PPC) have been able to accomplish when they start to cut some of the fat out of the software ... suddenly my "old" G5s start to sparkle again, able to do meaningful real world work once more.

Honestly, per an earlier post of mine, I have "promoted" my G5 Quad to my main desk, and do a large amount of real world work on it. I use my Mac Studio these days only for the things the Quad cannot reasonably accomplish.

This has always been the point. I did not do all that work, and endure all the aggravation and expense required to restore my Quads just because of vintage computing nostalgia (although that does help!). I spent all that time, effort and money because I firmly believe that my G5s are incredible machines that I can use for real work, for a long time to come. It doesn't hurt that I like each ensuing release of macOS less and less, and prefer the older, simpler, faster and cleaner GUIs of Leopard and Tiger.

There is another benefit to this too, quite aside from speed and a cleaner GUI.... security! Time has moved on, and there are not a lot of "bad guys" targeting malware to Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard anymore. As a result, all three OSs are incredibly safe environments to work in these days. Even "back in the day", they were way, way safer than the Windows of the time.

The "bad guys" rely on volume: if only a tiny percentage of users click their malicious links, those links must be targeted to the highest volume platforms. Tiger, (Sorbet) Leopard and Snow Leopard are absolutely NOT high volume platforms anymore, and are thus pretty much outside of the hackers realm. Using these platforms for daily work is rather like "hiding in plain sight". There you are, and they could target you, but the return is too low, so they leave you alone.

Safety, efficiency and nostalgia all rolled into one. It all adds up to a superior computing experience.

...efficient software, people, think efficient software! This is a gospel I will preach until the day they plant me 6 feet under

I have run in to my share of inefficient software on PowerPC. And not even the Quad helped much. I agree with you, I'm just saying that the PowerPC period was not without its own inefficiencies.

QuarkXPress was my main bugaboo. QXP 7 and 8 were released during the Intel era and were optimized for Intel. Despite running on PowerPC, because of that Intel optimization, it had effects on PowerPC. QXP 7 was particularly slow.

One of the major offenses in QuarkXPress 7 and 8 was that Quark did not optimize the type engine. The type engine in 6, 7 and 8 was from OS9, wrapped in a shell that OS X could communicate with. The problem with that was I worked for a newspaper and we had multiple tabloid size pages of two column text at 6pt type. Both our legals and classifieds. QXP 7 and 8 would render ALL of the type at once whenever you made a change. Not just the page on screen. I was forced to revert to QXP 6 for the legals and classifieds and then bring it forward when it was all set.

Adobe CS4 on the other hand worked just fine on PowerPC.

It's an edge case for sure, but these programs have been putting food on my table and paying my bills since 1999. I need them to work.

 

[mac57mac57]

Sorry to hear that @eyoungren. It is tough to be reliant on a program that is not optimized for your architecture... rather like running MS-Office 2004 on a Mac, except that I have always been suspicious that MS purposely hobbled it on Macs.

Nonetheless, I hear you. VERY frustrating!

 

[z970]

It is also a reflection of how clever people like @thewireless and @z970 are - these people breathed new life into these struggling machines with their optimized software. Thanks to them, we can continue to do useful work on these venerable boxes. Thanks guys!

Nostalgia aside, just look at what @thewireless (Aquafox) and @z970 (Sorbet Leopard, SL_PPC) have been able to accomplish when they start to cut some of the fat out of the software ... suddenly my "old" G5s start to sparkle again, able to do meaningful real world work once more.

While history often likes to remember just a couple of figures for simplicity's sake, it frequently comes at the cost of accuracy and historical context. It should be noted that when both @thewireless and I performed the comparatively minor tasks of configuring existing software to more effectively meet our needs today (and marketing them both to some degree so other people know they exist), it is still dwarfed to the collective of developers and organizations that came before us. All of us stand on the shoulders of giants.

With a few modifications, Aquafox merely picked up where @wicknix's InterWeb-PPC left off (and was concurrently assisted by @pipetogrep's TenFourFox Development Toolkit), which in turn built upon the prolific development of Cameron Kaiser's TenFourFox project, which never would have been possible in the first place without the Firefox codebase being made open source, allowing future generations of users to benefit from the tireless programming that Mozilla assembled many years ago (which even it was forked from Netscape Navigator if you go far enough).

TenFourFoxPEP, which Aquafox leverages out-of-the-box for much of its performance improvement over prior TFF iterations, was originally forked from Looking4awayout's UOC Patch project and developed in tandem with his. Before that however, I was inspired to get involved in browser optimization from @eyoungren's efforts tweaking TenFourFox for better usability. Had he not kicked off that initiative, I likely wouldn't have been driven to contribute because the demonstration of what's possible wouldn't have been there.

Likewise, Sorbet Leopard was just a more fleshed-out continuation of the AquaTrimcelerator optimization scripts I made years back, which were originally inspired by a fellow on Macintosh Garden called SkyCapt detailing his adventures slimming down OS X in order to get more performance out of the system, the results of which captivated many of us at the time. Many years ago, even the basic idea of what would later become Sorbet was first raised by either @swamprock or @AmazingHenry (who left a few years after I joined the forum); eventually, I just ended up being the one to actually throw everything together with some polish and refinements of my own. Otherwise, Sorbet wouldn't have been possible without the innumerable contributions of many people across the internet, some of which from this forum, publishing their oftentimes seldom-known projects individually customizing and speeding up Leopard. Which of course Apple first provided the foundation of for everyone (like Mozilla, which they themselves initially forked from NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD).

I'm just glad that through Sorbet, far more people were given the chance to enjoy the fruits of for example Rolande's extensive network optimizations, Tobias Netzel's Leopard-WebKit, and SourceSunTom's LeopardRebirth, among many others mentioned in the project's credits. Maybe it's thanks to all of the marketing I had a little too much fun with, or maybe the modern social media networks just went to town during the time most people were still recovering from the pandemic. Who knows.

Regardless, I'd also like to be clear I had no involvement in the Snow Leopard PPC project. That was handled almost exclusively by the very skilled developers and volunteers mentioned in its relevant threads, and they've since made major strides since it first began. I think it will be very interesting to see where it goes in the future.

Lastly, I also disagree on the point of security; the most secure system is an air-gapped one, in which case people can even use DOS without any concern. But for connected systems lacking any sort of firewall, if a professional specifically wanted to target any one of these machines, unless they were running PPC Linux (or especially OpenBSD), they'd be very easy nuts to crack because of the large numbers of unpatched CVEs. Security by obscurity does have some validity in practice, as does reducing potential attack surface which Sorbet tries to do wherever possible, but both on their own can only go so far.

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @z970. As a (relative) newcomer to the world of Mac software optimization, I lack the history you filled in. It is great to see.

"Security by Obscurity" ... nice turn of phrase. I may borrow that at some future point!

Speaking of users running these obscure OSs (Tiger, Leopard, Sorbet), while I agree that they could be hacked if the hackers wanted to, that is the whole point of "security by obscurity"... they don't want to. The population of possible victims is just too small; there is no financial incentive.

If you are a high profile person, perhaps the bad guys might want to hack you, but if you are a high profile person, your handlers probably would not consider allowing you to use vintage computers. Meanwhile, most, if not all, of we vintage computing fans are quite ordinary people, albeit with a quite "unordinary" hobby and are small enough in number to not warrant attention from the world's hackers... we are literally hiding in plain sight.

Therefore, I continue to assert that I am safer computing on my Sorbet-equipped G5 Quad than I am on my Sonoma-equipped MacBook Pro.

 

[z970]

@mac57mac57 Fair enough. Hardware-wise, I do trust Open Firmware and the UniNorth chipsets in our Power Macs much more than the Apple Silicon or modern Intel / AMD equivalents found in current systems. If one chose to install OpenBSD onto their G4 instead of OS X, I would go so far as to argue that this particular system combination is considerably more secure than even a modern mainstream equivalent with its hackable firmware running data-harvesting software.

It is furthermore no contest that most of us are probably happier computing on our G5s, Pentium IIIs, and MIPS systems of choice anyway. With the endless software now freely available for these legacy platforms, and the continuing development of technological marvels like Protoweb gradually satisfying almost every basic online need one could have, I am personally having difficulty justifying the constant use of a modern system for the sake of it (unless of course one is necessary to make a living).

On that note, I wanted to make one more point: I remember a decade ago, we thought our systems would probably stop being usable within another five years or so (already another decade after most people thought they would stop being usable). Five years later, we thought we might be able to squeeze a few more years out of them yet but probably no more than that, and here we are now fast approaching 2026(!), and it turns out they're still just as usable as they were in 2006 or earlier if you know both how to get the software and where to go online.

Meaning in reality, they are by no means 'dying'; rather, they'll last 'till the solder falls off and their capacitors blow, and even those can eventually be replaced. What's more important is preserving the knowledge of their historical significance, the online and offline resources they were designed to be used with, and the information needed for future generations to learn about and make use of them as they were intended, for whoever is interested. As long as there is a public interest--and the electricity to run them--these classic platforms and their contemporary ecosystems will simply never die. Case in point, people are STILL making software for machines from the 1970's!

Anyway, that's all I have to say. I'm getting off my soapbox...

 

[mac57mac57]

What's more important is preserving the knowledge of their historical significance, the online and offline resources they were designed to be used with, and the information needed for future generations to learn about and make use of them as they were intended, for whoever is interested.

@z970, I could not agree more! That is precisely why I started www.retro-computing.com, to preserve and publish all the vintage software I had (I have been using PCs and Macs for longer than I want to admit, so I had a large collection of software I could publish) so that others could access this rich trove of historical software for a long time to come. I continue to add to the collection as new things come my way.

This is also the motivation behind the two major documents I have written over the past months and published both here and on www.retro-computing.com, on how to (a) overhaul a G5 Quad LCS and (b) convert a G5 Quad to air cooling. In both cases, I felt compelled to preserve this detailed information so that others can keep their machines running well into the future.

Finally, this was also the motivation behind my happymacs.ddns.net Gopher site, which serves up archives of vintage Mac software, largely focused on pre-Mac OS X releases, via the all-but-dead Gopher protocol. In this case, the site both preserves and publishes vintage Mac software AND hopefully provides compelling enough content to encourage people to get a Gopher client and try it. By the way, there is a wide slate of Gopher clients for many different OSs (even current macOS) available at the retro-computing.com site. If you have a web browser, you can go to the site and download a Gopher browser, and off you go!

So... coming back to where I started, I could not agree more! Preserving the software and the knowledge of how to use it is of enormous importance.

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks @z970. As a (relative) newcomer to the world of Mac software optimization, I lack the history you filled in. It is great to see.

"Security by Obscurity" ... nice turn of phrase. I may borrow that at some future point!

Speaking of users running these obscure OSs (Tiger, Leopard, Sorbet), while I agree that they could be hacked if the hackers wanted to, that is the whole point of "security by obscurity"... they don't want to. The population of possible victims is just too small; there is no financial incentive.

If you are a high profile person, perhaps the bad guys might want to hack you, but if you are a high profile person, your handlers probably would not consider allowing you to use vintage computers. Meanwhile, most, if not all, of we vintage computing fans are quite ordinary people, albeit with a quite "unordinary" hobby and are small enough in number to not warrant attention from the world's hackers... we are literally hiding in plain sight.

Therefore, I continue to assert that I am safer computing on my Sorbet-equipped G5 Quad than I am on my Sonoma-equipped MacBook Pro.

Several years back, Cameron Kaiser (the creator of TenFourFox) pointed out that while our PowerPC Macs are less likely to be targeted simply because the user base is no longer there, we can still be vulnerable in the right (wrong?) situation. There was a hack out there at the time that breached the browser and OS security features and delivered it's payload. It was only because the code could NOT be executed by a PowerPC Mac that it failed. But Kaiser's point at the time was that we can't hide entirely under obscurity.

You just got to pay attention and do the best you can.