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pipetogrep

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 27, 2021
348
499
Hi all,

Shameless plug: My buddy @Melchieor and I have a podcast called Forkbomb where we talk about (usually) retro tech related stuff. We just finished an episode about PowerPC processors and Macs. I figured I'd share.

I hope y'all enjoy it and thanks for listening!

https://forkbomb.podbean.com/e/episode-32-the-powerpc-and-the-macintosh/

EDIT: I forgot to mention, we produced the whole episode on PowerPC Macs. Recording, editing, even audio chatting over the Internet on Bonjour over a VPN connection! It was a really fun challenge and shows what these machines are still capable of.
 
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Certificate of Excellence

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Feb 9, 2021
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MrVitalic

macrumors regular
Mar 16, 2020
164
202
Hi all,

Shameless plug: My buddy @Melchieor and I have a podcast called Forkbomb where we talk about (usually) retro tech related stuff. We just finished an episode about PowerPC processors and Macs. I figured I'd share.

I hope y'all enjoy it and thanks for listening!

https://forkbomb.podbean.com/e/episode-32-the-powerpc-and-the-macintosh/

I'm listening to your podcast at work. Super cool !! 👌 I have a strange illness, since I got into the world of ppc mac, I have more fun with them, than I have with my 'modern' mac. What blow my mind is that, when I compare a G5 from 2004 that I'm using today to what I was running at the same time when I was into pc ( amd athlon xp 2200+ on a asus a7n8x-x and a radeon 9800 pro), I'm amazed by how cutting edge these machine were.
 

Amethyst1

macrumors G3
Oct 28, 2015
9,782
12,182
What blow my mind is that, when I compare a G5 from 2004 that I'm using today to what I was running at the same time when I was into pc ( amd athlon xp 2200+ on a asus a7n8x-x and a radeon 9800 pro), I'm amazed by how cutting edge these machine were.
64-bit x86 CPUs were also available in 2004. And systems sold as professional workstations had better be cutting edge.
 

MrVitalic

macrumors regular
Mar 16, 2020
164
202
64-bit x86 CPUs were also available in 2004. And systems sold as professional workstations had better be cutting edge.
Of course, there was the first amd 64 bit processor and all the talk in town was the migration to 64bit code (at that time I was studying in computer tech, mainly in server stuff), but nonetheless, tiger/leopard are much better os compared to windows xp. Anyway, thats just my opinion.

edit: win xp is ok, I hate vista and love win 7 and now I kind of hate win 10.
 
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pipetogrep

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 27, 2021
348
499
I'm listening to your podcast at work. Super cool !! 👌 I have a strange illness, since I got into the world of ppc mac, I have more fun with them, than I have with my 'modern' mac. What blow my mind is that, when I compare a G5 from 2004 that I'm using today to what I was running at the same time when I was into pc ( amd athlon xp 2200+ on a asus a7n8x-x and a radeon 9800 pro), I'm amazed by how cutting edge these machine were.
Thanks for listening! agreed, those machines are amazing even today.
 

pipetogrep

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 27, 2021
348
499
Enjoying the episode! You should submit your podcast to the iTunes podcast directory as well!
Thanks for listening! I thought it already was. I’ll double check.

Edit: Yep. We’re in there.
 

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JohnAJ

macrumors newbie
Mar 1, 2021
15
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Thanks for listening! I thought it already was. I’ll double check.

Edit: Yep. We’re in there.
Oh, I must have searched for "forkbomb" as a single word!

Great episode, by the way. I'm about halfway through.

I'd like to add to what you both said about e-mail on PowerPC that it is possible to get Mail.app working with Gmail and other modern e-mail servers through a local stunnel proxy. I've done it successfully on Snow Leopard (detailed here), but I don't think there's anything preventing the stunnel port from working on Tiger. By starting stunnel at boot with launchd, the user experience is identical to what it was back in the day.
 

Melchieor

macrumors member
Jan 24, 2021
77
98
Hi Everyone! I wanted to announce today we just released our latest episode! This time with Sean of ActionRetro YouTube channel! It's the home of cursed Macs, insane upgrades, and old Macs running Minecraft despite being built a decade or more before the game ever came out. Give a listen and find out more!
Thanks, Sean, for your time and for fun interview! Please review the show on iTunes . We would greatly appreciate it :) iTunes link to the show

forkbomb podcast - interview with ActionRetro!
 

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z970

macrumors 68040
Jun 2, 2017
3,589
4,541
@Melchieor Awesome episode! Your overview on Sorbet Leopard at the end absolutely made my night! :D

To chime in on a few topics raised during that segment ...

10.5.9 takes no components from the Snow Leopard PowerPC beta; any and all parts from Snow Leopard are taken from the final 10.6.8 retail release.

As of this time, there are no plans to import XNU 10.0.0 (Darwin's kernel) from the aforementioned beta, as, being an older and differently versioned build than XNU 9.8.0, may run the risk of introducing several incompatibilities among the system libraries and at least a handful of applications from Leopard's expansive app library.

Mass integration with QuartzGL, for the most part, ended up scrapped in the final build due to unsatisfactory results and high system requirements. Believe it or not, Apple even made several built-in apps use QuartzGL by default in the original Leopard release, and those apps were configured to not use QuartzGL in Sorbet (details are in Sorbet's changelog). The end result is that they're lighter-weight, and do not stress the RAM and CPU as much on less-able systems. Therefore, Sorbet Leopard is actually more compatible with, for example systems equipped with a Radeon 9000 Pro, than regular Leopard is.

The graphical fluidity seen in the final release is mostly a result of BeamSync / V-Sync being turned off (which means less work for the GPU to do, so it can focus on just rendering the animations themselves rather than refreshing the screen more times than necessary), in addition to Spotlight being disabled by default, which is a big CPU consumer. Moreover, because the Quartz Compositor display server does all the graphical math on the CPU but paints images using the GPU (since 10.2, with Quartz Extreme), disabling Spotlight frees up the CPU to focus on doing said graphical math rather than passively indexing unused disks.

So in layman's terms, I suppose it can be simplified to the following: regular Leopard has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and Sorbet Leopard does not. Therefore, while regular Leopard is too busy admiring the clouds or balancing its checkbook, Sorbet Leopard is diligently working on rendering those graphics, and allocating the active application all the resources it needs so that it can consistently perform well and not lag or lock up.

-

I would be positively delighted to take part in an interview sometime in the future! You and Chris were a big help during Sorbet's development cycle, and I think it would be great to keep in touch!

Until then though, keep them coming! :)
 
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Fun listen, but i cringed at the firefox section. It is actually worse than chrome when it comes to lack of privacy. Check these links out for an eye-opening read.



I… I’m… slowly wending through those pages on digdeeper, but hooboy, that(/those) writer(s) desperately need an editor to organize their points. 👓

UPDATE, ten minutes later: Oh lordt, the tinhat makes its glinty cameo in the most unsubtle of ways. 🤦‍♀️

1690733893934.png

* Advice to any party out there critiquing tech on the tech itself: stay on topic with the tech and, in absence of an editor to keep you on point, let readers of the critique make their own heads or tails on the social implications of the tech’s ability or inability to do (or disable) things based on the parameters of the tech itself. Don’t do the above stuff which ages like milkwine.
 
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AphoticD

macrumors 68020
Feb 17, 2017
2,283
3,466
UPDATE, ten minutes later: Oh lordt, the tinhat makes its glinty cameo in the most unsubtle of ways. 🤦‍♀️
Oh yes, some statements don’t/won’t date well and said political topics simply divert attention from the privacy concerns expressed at the article’s core.

“Don’t mention the ___” - Fawlty Towers

Red or blue pill, no matter, it is up to the end-user to navigate one’s own path. No tech company anywhere should have so much control as to choose which view is right or wrong - unless this is the desire of the user (as in parental controls to guide one’s children), but for the majority of folks, it is not desired for a software developer, or any of the billionaire’s club to parent our views and curate whatever “truth” is trending now.

Browser level, DNS level, ISP, backbone/Cloudflare or whatever level manipulation of content is simply wrong and goes against all ideas of what the internet should be - decentralized communication.
 

doctor_dog

macrumors regular
Dec 19, 2022
109
107
You've shattered my world view a bit with this FF article. I've kind of been blindly believing them as "privacy first" for a while. At one point I was using Chromium and building it myself but it takes forever to build even on a decent machine.

I will throw in my $0.02 for that classic go-to, Little Snitch. I run it on every Mac I have. Is it a PITA to block all of those unsolicited requests (in both IPv4 AND IPv6)? Yes, yes it is. But once you get that ruleset down you can export it to the rest of your machines. Silliness in droves these days.

P.S. Please don't tell me Little Snitch is selling me out like FF too, then my whole world will *puff* up in smoke =)

EDIT: I didn't see anything about Safari in the article. I don't love it, but I figured I've entrusted Apple with all my other privacy and everything I do on their devices, if they wanted to have all my data they already would. Plus it would be reputationally damning for them if they got 'caught' siphoning off user data. Thoughts?

And better yet, I should take that Little Snitch ruleset and add it to my friggin router, but I fear they will get stale too quickly and I don't feel like updating it every month. Curious if anyone is doing their blocking at the network-level instead of host-based filtering though.
 
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Oh yes, some statements don’t/won’t date well and said political topics simply divert attention from the privacy concerns expressed at the article’s core.

“Don’t mention the ___” - Fawlty Towers

Red or blue pill, no matter, it is up to the end-user to navigate one’s own path. No tech company anywhere should have so much control as to choose which view is right or wrong - unless this is the desire of the user (as in parental controls to guide one’s children), but for the majority of folks, it is not desired for a software developer, or any of the billionaire’s club to parent our views and curate whatever “truth” is trending now.

You’re correct in that no tech company should be too powerful so as to stiff-arm and will proprietary standards into force. Microsoft (OS), Google (browser), and even Apple (payment services) have all been on the hot seat for this.

As for content passing through a tech company’s infrastructure, particularly publicly-traded ones, it underscores an urgency to de-commercialize those infrastructures and render them — by expropriation, if necessary — as public utilities.

Otherwise, at least in the purview of the U.S. (where a corporation is, in a twist of creative logic some two-plus centuries ago, a private legal person — literally, an “it”, not a “they”), there is no provision for dictating that legal persons are subject to the same legal constraints as public administrative bodies (which, in the U.S. context, the latter are subject to compliance with the First Amendment’s dictate on no law which may abridge “free speech” — however that may now be finely defined by volumes of subsequent jurisprudence).

In short, I look to tech shareholders to hold their end of the ownership share bargain by urging those corporations to jettison proprietary, short-term standards at the great benefit of long-term, open standards. Additionally, those shareholders (check your pension and retirement portfolios, folks) need to decide what’s more crucial: the greater good of corporations releasing proprietary platforms and rendering them into worldwide standards (even as that means losing some front-loaded, fast and big profit) before a public realm, as public utilities, or how big that quarterly dividend deposit into one’s pension/retirement account is gonna be.

It’s impossible and at fundamental odds against one another to wish, want, and expect for both, concurrently.

This goes for Cloudflare; it goes for Google/Microsoft/Apple/Mozilla (as major browser maintainers); and it goes for “Section 230”-adjacent social platforms. It’s impossible to expect corporate “people” to act as human as actual, living individuals and to expect them to also be in a legal, catch-22 to make their private, corporate “selves” (the Metas, the Xs, the Apples, and so on) operate as public utilities whilst conducting themselves in their own, “personal” (i.e., organizational), private/publicly-traded, for-profit interests.

Tech companies are no different than industrial and manufacturing companies of yore. If they want to survive and co-exist, sustainability, in a civil society — one held accountable publicly — then they will need to cede some of their proprietary grip and some of their quarterly earnings, or have it broken up (via anti-trust jurisprudence) and/or expropriated (legislatively).

tl;dr: Advanced capitalism means making, individually and collectively alike, challenging decisions about the kind of world we want.


Browser level, DNS level, ISP, backbone/Cloudflare or whatever level manipulation of content is simply wrong and goes against all ideas of what the internet should be - decentralized communication.

The internet should be (from the vantage of a fellow Old) a decentralized, de-monetized paradigm/modal of public communication, within which newsgroup, forum, and chatroom policies, put together by private folks and orgs, can still be enforced, whilst the wider internet remains unencumbered by those policies. It also means no one gets to have a viral megaphone (which, frankly, would also be a delight, for a change).

To decentralize and to de-monetize, of course, would upend so, so much, but if one is old enough, it’s possible to at least remember what that once was like… you know, before the MBAs started moving to Silicon Valley and turning it into the hyper-commercial mess it is now.
 
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