I think that, as long as large groups of people are in love with the idea of murdering large numbers of other people in spectacular ways, a space elevator on Earth is extremely ill advised, and building one is just asking to see how many people it will kill when it comes crashing down.

Hey, just because it happened twice in the Mars trilogy...

I'm not sure how happy Tiger would be running on a G3 though.

I've never really noticed worse performance running Tiger on my G3 iBook. I do have the last G3 iBook (900 mhz) with 640 Meg RAM, and I pretty much just use it for web browsing or watching DVDs.

It does have speed problems playing downloaded video, but I'm not sure if that's gotten worse under Tiger.

a space elevator on Earth is extremely ill advised, and building one is just asking to see how many people it will kill when it comes crashing down.

Mostly the Earth end will be tethered in the ocean near the equator.

If a space elevator is cut, the part above the cut will fly off into space. So if, say, a plane flew into it at 35,000 feet, you'd end up with about 8 miles of space elevator crashing down. Or more like floating down.

It would suck to actually be on the elevator when it flies off into space, though.

Mostly the Earth end will be tethered in the ocean near the equator.

Where will the rest of it be tethered?

I've read that the tether part will probably be some sort of mobile platform, so the elevator can be moved out of the way of storms and orbiting space junk and what-not.

eta:

Where will the rest of it be tethered?

The other end will be a counterweight, somewhere further from earth than geostationary orbit.

The neat thing about the current plans for the space elevator is that it will run on nanotube "cables" so these super-thin, super-strong cables will theoretically be quite hard to break.

Of course, the completion date is still 12 years off, and the technology is still not completly in place, but that's what these tests are all about. slow but steady progress.

Plus? The benefits form the tests and resulting serendipitous knowlege may well outweigh the benefits of the actual elevator. Sort of like the (other) space program.

Hopefully with better PR to explain the benefits than NASA has.

Allyson:

Based on the information you've given us, it looks like you've probably got the iMac 600 or 700 - the fastest, most recent graphite iMacs (earlier ones actually had the DVD-ROM instead of the CD-RW). These were released in early or summer 2001, depending on the exact make, so the computer is technically a bit less than 5 years old.

Still, based on the specs, I really think you can run Tiger fine. The iMac is much like my poor iBook that just died, which loved Tiger. So here's what I'd recommend, if you really don't want to upgrade instead.

1) Up the RAM. It looks like it can handle up to a GB, and I'd suggest putting at least 768 MB in there. This will be, by far, the best, most significant hardware upgrade for that computer. (You can find out how much you have now by going into the Apple Menu and selecting "About this Mac" - if you have at least 512 MB, this step is not a necessity, but if you have less, it is.)

2) Call Apple and bitch at them enough that they send you Tiger on CD.

3) Install Tiger. Preferably after backing up and wiping your hard drive clean, as an upgrade from 10.1 -> 10.4 would likely cause more problems than it fixed unless it was a clean install.

4) Be happy that you've pulled another year or so out of a very old (but still pretty!) machine.

A final word: I think ND is right. If you keep your eyes peeled, you can get a low-end Mac Mini AND decent LCD monitor for about $600 (either through Apple+craigslist, craigslist alone, ebay, or whatever). This will be about 2-3 times as fast as the iMac, so you could use it for another 3-4 years or so. Now, upgrading the RAM on your iMac to max and installing tiger will probably only cost about $200, so it's cheaper in cash now, but the time, effort, and hassle involved may make it worth the extra cost to upgrade now.

And that's all the advice I have.

Nah. I can't afford all that.

I got this when ita was here. Has it really been that long?

Nah. I can't afford all that.

I'm running OSX 10.3.9 on an old Power Mac with a G3 upgrade card and only 576MB of RAM, and it runs much faster than it did on 10.1, so if you were to get a used copy of 10.3 cheap somewhere, it might be all you need to perk it up a bit. (Craigslist? eBay?)

OWC has 512MB PC100 for the iMac G3 350-700 models for around $75, with lifetime warrantee.