CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

They're either fruit iBooks (most likely), or, less likely, iceBook G3s. The catch -- you need to go get them on the day of sale, and they're in Virginia. If you can get there, you can get a nice deal. This appeared in a Virginia newspaper and was reported on a Macintoshes in Ministry list I read.

MacMinistry Mailing List wrote:Henrico County Public Schools has announced that used Apple iBook laptop computers will be on sale for $50 each on Tuesday, Aug. 9, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

One-thousand laptops will be sold at the school warehouse, which is located at 361 Dabbs House Road beside the Eastern Government Center. The laptops will be sold on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will
be no waiting list. Only cash or checks will be accepted.

The Power PC 750s with 12-inch screens have 320 megabytes of memory and are installed with the AppleWorks Operating System. [shooby says ... not too bright, are they?]

For more information, contact Mychael Dickerson, director of media relations and safety for Henrico County Public Schools, at mddickerson@henrico.k12.va.us, or 804-652-3724

EDIT: The small print -- I have nothing to do with the sale, and know nothing about the seller. If you go to get one, and they stink, that's your worry -- contact the guy first if you have questions, although most of the time these school sales generate great deals. A lot of my older Macs are university and school surplus or discards.

Wish I lived in Virginia.

Um ... wow.

If I lived near Virginia...

dude id buy like 4....

okay 1... i only have like 70 dollars ToT

but dang, 750 mhz... then again OS X doesn't require much as many windows systems. and whats an appleworks operating system? lol... looks like they got word processors mixed with operating systems

would be nice to know what OS it is running, im assuming an early version of OS X? like Puma?

You've got them mixed. 750 = G3. They have 320MB of RAM.

They most likely run OS 9. Doesn't matter, as the fruit iBooks are still supported in Tiger AFAIK.

ack i meant processor speed ^^;; not memory speed

but the G3's were 750 mhz? Hmm I thought they were more

I need to move to Virginia fast xD

[quote="Mr. SmartyPants"]ack i meant processor speed ^^]

No, no. The PowerPC 750 is what's referred to as a "G3" (just like the 7400 series is called the "G4" and the 970 is called the "G5"). G3s do get pretty fast, although it's more common to see G4s in the 750MHz-ish range and Apple never made a G3-based system that was natively faster than 500MHz. By that time, they had transitioned to the lower-speed first generation G4s for AltiVec and had little use for the fast G3s that came later.

If you don't mind a question from an outsider (Win user) do the MHz speed mean the same for Apple as for a PC, or is it comparing apples and oranges?

No joke intended?

Yes, clock speeds for PowerPCs and x86s are generally not comparable, just like between AMDs and Intels they are not either (that was why AMD did things like release Athlons with a separate number ostensibly representing the "equivalent Intel clock").

In the case of the G4 and the P4, which had a huge gulf between them w/r/t clock speed, the difference is primarily pipelining. The G4 has a very shallow pipeline which does a lot of work per clock cycle, while the P4 is deeply pipelined and does minimal steps (but a large number of them). For this reason, the P4 requires a much higher clock speed to do the same work that the G4 does, although the payoff for the P4 is that the design can be clocked faster and faster as long as heat is not an issue because the small pipeline steps lend themselves to being done more quickly. On the other hand, the G4 doesn't get as hot and can do things more efficiently per tick, so choose your poison.

Note that pipelining is not the whole story, but it *is* a lot of it.

The gulf narrowed with the G5, which has a more pipelined architecture and uses some mechanisms for u-ops that are analogous to the P4, although an equivalent MIPS-benchmark G5 is still in general clocked a significant percentage under a P4 of whatever generation (I don't know all Intel's stupid code names ).

For those who are interested, just to complete the course, the G1 was the original PowerPC 601 in the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100, 7200, 7500, 8100 and 8200; the G2 sort of refers to the PPC 603 and 604 series en masse. Neither of these are official terms.

EDIT: I should add that massive pipelining is no panacea, especially if you have sucky branch prediction. On the P4, if its pipeline gets invalidated -- such as a branch predicted wrong and you have to start executing from an unexpected location -- you have a huge number of clock cycles wasted doing nothing while we wait to clear the pipeline. This is such a feared consequence on the P4 that there is a lot of silicon dedicated to accurately keeping the pipeline full. The G4 doesn't have (much of) this problem because its pipeline is much shallower and any burp will filter out in a few ticks.

shooraijin wrote:No, no. The PowerPC 750 is what's referred to as a "G3" (just like the 7400 series is called the "G4" and the 970 is called the "G5"). G3s do get pretty fast, although it's more common to see G4s in the 750MHz-ish range and Apple never made a G3-based system that was natively faster than 500MHz. By that time, they had transitioned to the lower-speed first generation G4s for AltiVec and had little use for the fast G3s that came later.

oooooohhhhh

hmm... that explains stuff ^^

[quote="shooraijin"]No joke intended? ]
Thanks. (and no pun intended... just a poor choice of words)

AnimeHeretic wrote:Thanks. (and no pun intended... just a poor choice of words)

This is the first time with AH that the pun was *not* intended

LoL! 3 more days (the 12th) and I'd be in Virginia. ah well.. Hope some good people get to take advantage of this. ^_^

[quote="Steeltemplar"]This is the first time with AH that the pun was *not* intended ]
<Laughs along with everyone else, then pummels ST>