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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: paddlefoot on Apr 01, '04 09:50:13AM

I think this ultimately fails as an April Fool's Day prank. Shouldn't there be some humor involved? I always thought a good prank worked like this: you initially fall for it, but then after it's revealed as a hoax, you go back and look at the article (or ad or whatever) again and only then do you see the absurd little details, and you think "Wow, what a fool I was to fall for that!"

Maybe I'm not geeky enough to figure out the joke , but in a world of TripleTrack razors, what's so absurd about a computer with three processors? We already have dual processor machines, so why not triple? Hell, if I had the money I'd probably buy one. Or three.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: robg on Apr 01, '04 09:53:21AM
Not necessarily - the idea of April Fool's is to fool people, as apparently has happened to CNN, the NY Times, and others, regarding Google's April 1st gmail announcement. Check the front page of CNN for more: Google to offer free mega-email.

At the end of the day, if you made someone think it might have been real, then you've succeeded at an April Fool's day prank. The one rule I follow is to try to not do anything that might lead someone to hurt themselves or others...

-rob.

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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: Anonymous on Apr 01, '04 10:12:54AM

Rob, as weird as this may sound, I think it's legit. Either that, or Google is doing one hellishly good job with that prank, as I've heard rumors about Google offering free webmail for a while ... they must've been laying the groundwork early.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: robg on Apr 01, '04 11:07:04AM

Google will offer free web mail. The aspect that makes this one seem particularly April Fools-ish is the 1gigabyte of storage per person. Consider 100,000,000 users of Google at a gigabyte each...

-rob.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: robg on Apr 01, '04 11:54:38AM

Hmm ... now they have more info up, and they do claim 1gb. Either it's real, or it's the most elaborate prank ever :).

-rob.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: reiggin on Apr 01, '04 12:01:09PM

This is Google's April Fools Joke:

http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html



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gmail
Authored by: rgray on Apr 01, '04 12:14:54PM
con 1. no link in the CNN article (may be de rigeur for CNN - not my source of choice).
con 2. nothing on google.com front page

pro 1. see gmail.com
pro 2. CBC (trusty source) Ottawa local news at 11:30am Eastern time ran with this story.

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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: Makosuke on Apr 01, '04 01:14:44PM

The 1GB Google webmail thing certainly seems suspect (and it'd be an odd choice to release something so drastic on April 1st), but although my first thought was "obvious prank", it's not entirely infeasable;

Say, hypothetically, that their 1GB e-mail limit applied only to text mail. I'm assuming that they've got some sort of fancy compression scheme that allows them to deal with the mind-boggling ammounts of data they do, so 1GB of text could easily be a tenth or even hundredth that in actual storage space. Still, 10-100MB of email is a helluva lot.

However, if it's text only, 99.9% of users are never going to go anywhere near that kind of storage; 2 years of de-spammed messages in my account adds up to 2000 messages, and that's only 10MB on disk. Heavy users of course have a lot more, but plenty of home folks have a lot less.

The one trick would be despamming, since that'd overload any "store everything" system very rapidly.

Anyway, I'm still highly skeptical, but it's not wildly out of the realm of possibility--with fancy compression, and averaging of loads, that "1GB" of storage might only end up being a couple of megabytes on disk per user.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: harmless on Apr 01, '04 03:17:57PM

Google Mail is not an April Fools joke.

The german magazine c't asked Google if it was and they said it wasn't.

See

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/46204

and

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go.shtml?read=1&msg_id=5414437&forum_id=54872


Andreas



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Gmail not a hoax...
Authored by: olivesoft on Apr 01, '04 04:12:54PM
From CNN:
However, Google's one gigabyte of storage claim led to some speculation about the Gmail announcement being a hoax since it took place on April Fool's Day. Google has pulled April Fool's jokes on the tech community before, including jokes about pigeons being the driving force behind Google's search technology and that Google was looking to start a new research center on the moon. In addition, the press release about Gmail was fairly goofy, including lines such as "Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born." But Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of the products group at Google, said the Gmail announcement was legitimate. He did concede that the company did get caught up in the spirit of April Fool's Day in its press release.

---
-Bob
---------------------
I tend to think of [Mac] OS X as Linux with QA and Taste.
-James Gosling, Java Architect

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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: Felix on Apr 02, '04 10:30:32AM

So what was (is) the final determination? Was this a hoax or not. Our esteemed webmaster sure seemed to think it was. Other highly-acclaimed folks in the Mac community said it was legit.

Now that it's 2 Apr, who was right?



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: Spartacus on Apr 01, '04 09:55:04AM

Here's the little absurdity: do you really think that if Apple built a 3 CPU Mac, they'd put the plastic handle to remove the CPU fans off-centre?

:)



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HAHAHA
Authored by: applepal on Apr 01, '04 04:02:05PM

u made me laff :)



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: timcrawf on Apr 01, '04 10:13:20AM

Actually, this worked great on me. Before reading past the headline, I opened a new window to Apple's site, and saw nothing about it, went to MacCentral, nothing. Go back to macosxhints, and read the date under the headline, there is the first clue.
Some other cluess:
The naming of the device and Steve'a explanation of it.
The comments about the water cooling system not ready for prime time.
The bit about making the most of the extra 6" by adding a few more ports.
These are the more obvious clues to me.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: robg on Apr 01, '04 11:11:13AM

Indeed, I tried to bury enough stuff to make it just believable but completely impossible.

As someone else pointed out, you cannot make a three-CPU G5 machine. "Wicked fast" is an old marketing term from the IIfx days. Pixar wouldn't have taken the order for the Dual G5s if they knew these were out on April 1st (which they would have known). The pull-tab is off center for the fans. There's no additional room on the case front for the three additional ports. IBM hasn't said a word about 2.5ghz G5 chips. Steve would never admit to a water cooling system until it was released. There are others, too, but those are the biggies :).

The idea was to make it realistic yet filled with enough fallacies that it couldn't possibly be true :). And besides, the Photoshopped G5 Quad was really ugly, so it became a Cubed!

-rob.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: nite77 on Apr 01, '04 11:04:17AM

well. and maybe the fact that computer's CPU *must* come in pairs (inside one system), they cannot be odd-numbered. It's just the way it works, somebody more knowledgeable of the fine details can fill me in here, but rest assured, the fact is this.

One *can* build a three-CPU system, but only by networking two or more computers together (like the VT's BigMac, although it too had an even number of CPUs).

---
/Nite - "can't rain all the time"
[ http://www.nitesade.net ]



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: olivesoft on Apr 01, '04 04:28:47PM

Explain the single CPU system, then...8-)

Computer people tend to design things in powers of two: 1, 2, 4, 8, etc.

---
-Bob
---------------------
I tend to think of [Mac] OS X as Linux with QA and Taste.
-James Gosling, Java Architect



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: paddlefoot on Apr 01, '04 05:09:49PM

Then a Google search on "three-processor computer" shouldn't turn up any links at all, right?



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: the1truestripes on Apr 02, '04 03:48:29PM
and maybe the fact that computer's CPU *must* come in pairs (inside one system), they cannot be odd-numbered.

Back when Sequent made hardware they made boxes with the CPUs on cards, you could use one or two CPUs per card and plug up to 16 or so into the box. It was a shared memory box, so if you put 3 CPUs in it would be like a 3 CPU G5. Well except I think they were 16Mhz CPUs, but that was pretty fast back then.

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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: macFanDave on Apr 01, '04 12:04:16PM

You are right, you are not geeky enough to get the humor. For whatever reason, (I'm not geeky enough to understand why) multiprocessor machines are built on powers of 2. The next logical step past dual processors is quad and then pipe dreams are built on 8 and 16 CPU machines.

So, to lift and alter a line from "Monty Python & the Holy Grail", three is right out.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: Carnildo on Apr 01, '04 03:55:39PM

The three CPUs was what made it obvious -- no-one in the world makes a 3-CPU machine. Another hint is it having both PCI-X and AGP: IIRC, PCI-X is a replacement for AGP.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: robg on Apr 01, '04 04:50:11PM

Actually, that part is true -- it was cut and pasted directly from the original Dual G5 press release. The PCI-X they are referring to is a high-speed PCI slot, not the PCI-X replacement for AGP slot. Confusing but true ... the Duals have both PCI-X slots and an AGP 8x slot.

-rob.



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