About two weeks ago we learned that the state of Illinois is thinking of eliminating our farm as part of the Prairie Parkway (www.prairie-parkway.com) project. Funny how things that seem to last for ever (92 years in the family so far) are suddenly very vulnerable. Needless to say we are doing our best to rally support for the expressway to be built somewhere else.

A few weeks ago I bought a PowerMac with dual 2.0 processors.  I
had looked through the reviews and was excited about working with
it.  Along the way I had seen a review that suggested it would run
about 25% faster than a dual 3.2 Xeon from Dell, so I thought that
would be pretty cool.

I was running a particularly long analysis recently and had the chance
to compare the PowerMac to the Dell, and was surprised to find that it
ran about as fast as you would expect a 2.0 G machine to run - in other
words, quite a bit slower.

I've thought a little about what could be going on.  The same
program was running on both machines (R - for those who are familiar
with stat software).  But I was running a version on the PowerMac
that I had downloaded, rather than building from scratch.  My
suspicion is that the PowerMac software was compiled on a 32bit machine
and, hence, it fails to take full advantage of the 64bit architecture.

Why don't I build it from scratch myself?  Learning curve and
limited time at the moment.  I hope to do that in the "not so
distant" future, but time will tell.

Which doesn't change the fact that I enjoy using the mac.  Change is good.

Anyone with PowerMac experience with R is invited to comment on whether
my suspicions are true - especially if they have compiled R from
scratch for OSX Tiger.