airport is IEEE 802.11 ethernet over 2.4GHz radio
bluetooth is radio, for peripherals I don't konw frequency. Shorter range, and allows anyone with a good radio dish to sniff your keystrokes. Forget email encryption, the gov can just take in everything you type!
and I quote
I think we'll see some unfounded performance
Indeed I think this G5 piece is full of unfounded performance. And as for Altivec being an invention or a multiplier ... I hate to be a spoil sport to my own Mac friends, but Altivec is a good implementation of SIMD, Single Instruction Multiple Data, same thing the original supercomputers were good at. Calling altivic an invention is like cutting the wings off an airplane, driving it on the ground and calling that an invention. Admittedly a rocket car, as is altivec, but even then...
unless you know the math you'll be doing, which is great for codecs, you can't speed it up using altivec. Any logic decisiions can't be improved by SIMD, so word processing, and the AI in games, and a lot of the logic fundamental to an OS can't be improved by SIMD. graphics can be. And the Quartz to pixel math is only made reasonable by SIMD.
And isn't the whole point of the G5 multiple cores? That's why they mentioned n-bar multiprocessing ... If by 1.6 GHz they mean 2*800 MHz, then I believe it. the G4 is not that old, and the story is fun, but - whatever...
and on firewire, it should be set to up its speed soon. But I haven't heard anything in a while. It's currently at 400Mbps which is roughly 50 MB/s and the speed jump originally proposed was double that. I'd like to see it come out just to trounce that weak USB 2.0 crap. What the werld neede was cheaper USB, not faster, those bastards. Since USB 2.0 is supposed to be forward and backward compatible with USB 1.1 (or whatever) I'd rather save my cash. Truth is, I just can't type more than 1.2 million characters per second, even in dvorak.
and I thought the MMU on G4's was now 36 bit, allowing the chip at least to deal with 16G of RAM right now. I could be off on that fact. But in truth, bitness is primarily a memory addressing issue, and a 64bit chip should be able to address not 16GB but 16 Petrabytes of RAM. I suppose good VM is important by then eh?
Good rumors require good humor. I'm not betting the farm on any of this. But I do think the G5 will retain Altivec.