Re: Apple to use Intel CPUs?

The man pages are what I was referring to. Unlike the Apple or MS docs there *is* good technical content there, but in most instances it is not very consistently presented or organized. The commercial Unix's do better in that regard, but still do not come close to the consistency and organization of the VMS docs. You can actually see this in the VMS docs for some layered products that were derived from the Unix side of the house. The docs for those components are notably different from the docs for the rest of VMS.

Pete C.

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Pete C.
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I consider it fundamentally unfair for the government to tie the hands of one company while allowing a competitor to do the very same thing.

Microsoft and Windows got where they are primarily because their products are/were appealing to a large number of consumers and for the most part work as advertised.

If most people did not want to use Microsoft products then their market share would shrink considerably. There are various alternatives available and some people choose to use them. The government should not be in the business of hindering a successful company in order to help a less successful competitor.

If Apple or any other competitor can survive on the market share that their products can achieve that's great. If however their market is too small to sustain them I see no reason they should not be allowed to fail.

For the instances where Microsoft's business practices have been illegal they certainly should be stopped, but those have not been as significant as the media and competitors try to hype it to be.

In particular nearly all of the instances have been unrelated to Apple. Most stem from Microsoft's OEM licensing practices which only have relevance to the PC architecture systems where Apple's OS products don't run.

I also viewed with particular interest and disgust Sun's desperate claims that Java was somehow a competitor to Windows. Java is not an OS, it's an OE at most, and an OE runs on an OS.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

You may think so, but there is plenty of research behind it, and Apple though enough of it to use it in their "Think Different" advertising.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

That is indeed what Apple tried to do, however it also stifled innovation and independent development.

Microsoft approached the same issues in a much better way (although a bit later than they should have) by introducing their Windows certification process and consistent install/uninstall utilities.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

Abstract thinking, as you term it, has a negative edge... However, I would agree that I am not normally going to pop-up the terminal and start typing unix commands. Otherwise, there is no fundamental or conceptual difference in the hierarchical file organization on windows, linux, or OSX. All of them try to make associations to real world structures. That is certainly an abstraction.

In fact, IEEE 1394 is an apple developed technology that they opened-up. And being an early adopter set the market trends and made life easier for users. By having Firewire, bluetooth, WiFi and other technologies standard, it just makes for a simpler user experience ? and longer lived hardware. Of the 3 mac and (just re-counted) 4 PCs I have, none of the PCs had Firewire, 1 had gigabit ethernet. Which are being useful today? * macs and 1 PC. Granted, that is in part because i do not want to wast e the time to upgrade all the machines to working state again. Leave a PC off for 2 months, and there are about a half days worth of update to make.

Well, you have the direct experience. However, knocking pro-sumer fails to see the trend. Apple has made real time video editing inexpensive (relative to custom kit). You can, and people are, making product quality work on Mac. I see I will not convince you, but I can give you some things to watch for entertainment:

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Ah yes... why is it that ISPs provide this stuff when all you need to do is go to the control panel and enter some numbers into the network settings. Yes, on a PC this helps a lot, but it is easier when ISPs simply provide the info for the user to enter on a mac.

I do not think we are talking about the same thing. give me a link for this auto-rise thing and I will look. I suspect it is not the same and not as elegantly integrated into the workflow. It is not the same as multidisplay - it can instantly shrink and show all windows - so if I have 40 documents open across 10 applications, I can show all instantly, move the mouse over it, the name pops up, click and I am there. Sounds slow, but it is much faster than picking tabs, or tabing though programs to find what you want. Look at the animation on apples site.

BUY acrobat. That is the point. Plus, acrobat does not work perfectly form all programs. Since the underlying window and page descriptions are based on PDF technology, it just works. everywhere. Nothing to add.

No, because as I said, RMB is the same as Control+LMB. Most mac users know that. However, I do expect that apple will change their dogma on this one since I also agree that a multi-button mouse is more productive.

Drivers are not the problem. In fact, it is very rare that one has to instal anything on a mac when installing new hardware or printers.

What I have never figured out on a PC is how you can have multiple network setting and quickly switch between them. On a mac, you simply create a location, and make your settings. So for example, I have Office, Home, Airport, Girlfriends house... simply select one from the apple menu and away I go. All network settings change instantly and reliably.

In my case I user fixed IPs in my studio, but at home I have WiFi and use DHCP. And yes, I have hardware with firewalls. In Switzerland Broadband routers a weee bit more expensive than that....

Well, it is actually a bit of a non-issue now with OSX since you can turn on show extensions. I guess I do not really mind them either, and have helped explain certain issues to new users.

Regarding security, when you download a file, and it is a program, OSX asks if you really want it. Anytime you open a new document that was not created by you, it ask if you want to open it for the first time in application XXX. There is a lot of layers a hacker has to get through. And I am sure they will try. However, it is ironic, that many of the problems people had in OS 9 and even in OSX tend to be due to use of virus protection software! If you friends have Norton utilities, get rid of it ASAP. That is the WORST.

I think it is more like do you want the optional airbag, and perhaps the steering wheel. But before you notice that you thought it looked like a fully equipped car from the outside.

OK, we disagree on the accounting and what is important.

Well, I am not an expert on these and I can not argue the details. My point being that apple is having success with high end super computer clusters. along with their other server and raid products. In part because of technical benefits ? everything from speed, ease of use, and in these cases especially cost. (I was surprised to see how much the reduced cooling cost makes a difference to these systems).

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(you may have seen this one before)
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Anyway, time to go home here! Cheers Daniel

I will get of my high horse now.... there is some work to do too... :-)

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daniel

I prefer to look at it as MS also swiping from Xerox. Apple's swiping it first does not give them legitimate possession in my book.

I'm not positive, but I think the Xerox research predated X-Windows by quite a bit. If I recall Xerox also invented the first mouse as part of the GUI research.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

That is true for the software crashes and hangs, but not for hardware problems. Melting laptops and dead displays are not caused by typos, at least not ones at the user level, perhaps on the designers CAD system.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

Well, the fact remains that neither Apple's OS folks nor Microsoft's Windows folks are anywhere near the quality or scale of the engineering groups for VMS or AIX or other high end enterprise class OS's.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

By far the best history of the modern OS lineage:

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Sorry, blanket statements are silly. What I have understood in our dialogue is that you have as many pre-conceptions and lack of (good) experience with OSX that you are just as biased.

I think you would find the memory management and multitasking significantly better on OSX. I have never ever been able to run more than 2 apps on windows without the one I am using suffering performance due to a background task. I cannot download a couple files, surf the net, and try and run SW at the same time. Where on the mac I can burn a DVD, surf the net, get mail, download, have photoshop,, Indesign, and other applications open and I will not feel it in my foreground app. That drives me nuts on the PCs.

I will claim that on the speed front they are generally equal, depending on task and program. However, I think if you sat a Dell precisions tower next to a G5 tower, and pulled them apart and examined them from a design, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering point of view, (objectively) the Mac would come out on top. Personally I am a bit of a perfectionist, and I expect excellence from all disciplines on a team. With apple, you can see that each area of expertise is working with creativity and invention. On the Dell, you can see accounting was creative, and the others made due. I prefer the former approach as to my way of thinking that level or teamwork and achievement give credibility to the reliability of the system as a whole. Just take one look at the cable bundles inside a Dell and the lack of cables inside the G5. Reliability.

Daniel

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daniel

Well, the contents of the DCL dictionary and users guides are hardly limited. Those guides and the online help equivalents are very thorough.

There is no technical reason that it couldn't, however for the documentation that you reference far less frequently such as installation guides there is little reason to occupy system disk space keeping it online. If you want it online for some reason, there is nothing stopping you from copying the contents of the doc CD online.

Given that VMS has been running on Itanium for some time now, the number of PCs running VMS is steadily climbing. It's of course not likely to replace Windows on the desktop, but that's not it's market anyway.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

I could, but I don't care to spend the time. My observations of numerous MAC and Windows users has sufficiently solidified this observation for me.

Artistic type tend to prefer the MAC UI and technical types tend to prefer the Windows UI. These two types show distinctly different methods to the organization of the icons on their desktops.

My observations have also shown that these two thought / organizational processes carry across the OS used. Artistic types exhibit the same organizational tendencies whether they are on a MAC or Windows, the same is seen with technical types.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

Not by a long shot. Look at the various shells (korn, borne, c) and desktop environments (gnome, kde, cde) you can use on the same Unix/Linux OS.

That would vary somewhat with the application. More complex applications will likely have a smaller percentage of code that is porting resistant. Mostly the problem portions would be on the UI call side. Most of a CAD application's internals should be pretty easy to port since they should not be relying on any Windows specific calls for their calculations.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

The user.dmp is presumably a compressed selective core dump. The drwtsn32.log has the human readable information with the PID of the process that crashed, the exception type, other running processes, processor registers, stack backtrace, etc.

The user.dmp looks to get overwritten with each process crash and is not very big, only a couple MB on a 128MB system. The drwtcn32.log looks like it gets appended with the info for each process crash so it would grow over time, but it's very small, only 200kb on my system with a total of 7 application exception entries, the earliest from 2003.

Perhaps that's proof that a W2K system can be pretty stable. It's also important to note that those 7 exceptions do not all represent system crashes either, most are just a single application.

Pete C.

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Pete C.

Not intending to put a negative edge on it, just pointing out a difference I have observed many many times. I'm also not referring to the way that the underlying file system operates, but rather the way the user organizes their desktop where I have seen a clear differentiation between the two user types regardless of the OS they are on. Presumably the underlying file systems on all the OSs are going to be similar since programmers are predominantly of the logical / technical type.

IEEE 1394 also did not work very well on either platform for the first few incarnations.

Incorporating technologies that a great many end users may never use also drives up the cost. Should all cars come standard with child seats even though a substantial percentage of users will never use them?

How does not having gigabit Ethernet make a PC unusable? I work for a large company with an enormous network infrastructure, and I can tell you that gigabit Ethernet is only in use for links between switches within a building. I have yet to see any penetration of gigabit Ethernet to the desktop level, and not much to the server level either. On the server side multiple 100mb likes seem to be preferred.

What percentage of users actually have a use for Firewire anyway? From what I've seen the percentage is pretty small. Even my friends on both PC and MAC do not use it, and this includes folks who do a lot of graphics and video work. I'd venture a guess that of all the Firewire ports out there, less than 10% are actually ever used.

The only folks using Firewire either have a fairly expensive pro-sumer camcorder, or they like to hook up external hard drives and use Firewire 'cause it's there vs. PC people who use USB2 for that.

Updates to a Windows system after a 2 month span would only take half a day if you are both limited to dialup and choose to install all available updates. The PC is by no means unusable without those updates, and the ones that could be critical (security) are all pretty small. The "fat" updates are the ones to Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player that are far from critical.

Apple's promotion of video editing on their systems has had two main results, one positive and one negative.

On the positive side it has provided more opportunities for people to experiment with video and this helps lead those who have some talent down the video career path.

On the negative side it has lead to a lot of people who have no talent for video work to think they do and start small businesses which has hurt the true professionals in the lower end of the field both by drawing business away from the pros, and also by turning some potential customers off after they have a bad experience with one of these "hacks".

I've seen the results of this in some of my freelance audio / video work. Power point has had similar results.

I've seen many instances where people who do not have the talent or expertise have produced video or Power point presentations for a large corporate meeting. They show up with big egos and then when their video doesn't play properly from their MAC/PC or the text that looked great on their desktop monitor is unreadable on the big $20k projector they resort to trying to pass the blame to the A/V tech crew.

I saw one particularly egregious case where someone had a presentation on their Powerbook (or whatever MAC variant) that we piped to the video projector and the PA system.

The presentation slides displayed just fine, the audio played just fine, but the video clips that they had embedded in their slides did not show (black window). They blamed this on the video projector of course, but anyone with half a clue knew this was pure BS since the entire rest of the screen was displaying just fine, and of course the video also was not visible on their MAC.

There are indeed some people who are producing quality video work on MACs, but these are the same people who can produce quality video work on PCs.

Those people understand the medium, the capabilities and limitations of the system they are using and know how to work within those capabilities. Above all else they understand that you can not reliably playback a finished project directly from the computer unless it has dedicated video hardware.

You can import video over Firewire from a suitably equipped camcorder (or Digital VCR). You can edit that video on the computer, whether it is a MAC or PC. You can output the finished video back via Firewire to the camcorder (or Digital VCR). You can not directly output video reliably from the computer without dedicated hardware.

The Firewire interface provides the buffering of the data stream from the timing glitches that will be present from the computer. Because the Firewire interface can move data faster than the real-time video stream requirements it is able to mask those glitches in the same way a CD player is able to mask read errors when the player experiences a shock and has to reposition the laser optics.

Rule #1 - *NEVER NEVER NEVER* install *ANY* ISP provided software on

*ANY* system, regardless of OS.

In either case for cable or DSL you should be using an inexpensive firewall router both for security and to provide isolation from ISP nonsense.

For dialup you only have a couple hardware firewall router options (Netgear FVS328 is one) and they are a bit more expensive though still under $200. Barring the hardware router for dialup, you should still be using the OS's native dialup networking utilities and not any ISP provided junk.

Most ISPs support folks are unable to provide the proper information at all as of late. You can generally find the info for DNS, POP3, SMTP and NEWS servers if you go to their support web sites though.

I more disturbing issue with ISPs of late is that you have to use their software to do the initial account registration and setup on the ISP end. Their support folks are unable to do these tasks anymore.

What this meant recently is that when my friend with the MAC moved to a new apartment in a new area and needed to start a cable modem service I ended up putting a fresh Windows install on a spare PC, bringing it over to do the ISP registration and then just formatting it after the registration was complete. There was no issue using the firewall router with the ISP, and in fact the registration was done through the router, but you had to use their software to do the registration.

The cable ISP where I live some 60 miles away did not have this problem. On their system if you put up a new MAC address, be it a router or PC their system just redirects you to a secure registration web site and requires no special software.

This cable ISP even lets you register multiple MAC addresses if you want. They understand the concept that you are paying for the connection pipe, not the PC and as long as you aren't constantly maxing out the bandwidth they have no reason to care what you have connected.

Well, showing all instantly sounds rather like what the Windows task bar does, and it can be set to auto hide until you move the mouse cursor to the very edge of the screen on whatever side you have chosen to place the task bar.

With the task bar in auto-hide mode it doesn't take up any desktop space. When you need to find that buried window you just move to the edge of the screen, the task bar pops up and you select the window you need from the icons on the task bar. Alt-tab does a very similar thing by popping up a window for you to select from the active windows.

The auto-rise thing originates from the Unix world where the window that you position the mouse cursor over gets focus without having to click on it. You just roll over to the visible edge of the window and it pops to the front. This feature is available when using eXcursion as well as available in separate utilities. I don't know any of the separate ones offhand since it is not a feature I use.

I'd buy it if I had a use for it, I don't so I don't. If MS was allowed to bundle it into Windows I wouldn't need to buy it, but I still wouldn't use it and I would have ended up paying a license fee for something I didn't want.

Well perhaps they will at some point, but multi button mice predated the MAC and it's been quite a while.

The multiple network setting thing is very much there in the PC world for WiFi but it's part of the WiFi cards utilities, not Windows itself. It never really materialized for hardwired networks since DHCP pretty well took care of that.

If you have one PC that is always on in the studio, you can run the MS DHCP service on it. Even when running DHCP in the studio you can still have fixed IP addresses by registering the machines MAC address on the DHCP server and assigning it an IP.

I use DHCP on all my machines, even the fixed hardwired servers and assign the IPs via the DHCP server. It makes it easier to keep track of what IPs are in use, and I still have a pool available for anyone visiting who doesn't have a fixed assignment.

You can't just order a Netgear or Linksys router from Amazon or someone? Get hit with import taxes or something? Ick.

It's good if they give you the choice.

Yes, in the default configuration most antivirus software is problematic. I run mine strictly on demand and don't have problems. Oddly enough I also never seem to get any viruses anyway. My web server gets attacked on a daily basis, but between the hardware firewall and an additional software firewall it has remained safe so far.

No matter how many layers of "Are you really sure you want to do this" you have, ultimately it is the naieve user who will click on that banner telling them they just won something. That issue is there regardless of OS unfortunately.

I particularly like the little popup with the warning that my computer's clock may be wrong, especially since I run the NIST time client on all my machines. It may be off a couple seconds since I use a 12 hr update interval, but it 'aint off by much.

Actually I don't want the airbag, but that's another group and thread.

I don't know that that is really a good comparison.

Why should I pay extra for a DVD burner if I'm not going to use it? What if I have more than one machine, why would I want a DVD burner on each one? At some point the cost of the DVD burner is low enough that it won't matter, much like CD-ROM is now, but until then why should I pay the extra $50-100?

How about the hard drive? Do I really want or need the 300GB drive if I'm just getting a laptop that I'll put on the little writing desk by the kitchen and use to check email and lookup recipes?

How about RAM? If I don't do gaming, graphics or CAD do I really need

1GB? Isn't 256MB just fine?

Granted these are fairly small amounts individually, but if all you need is email, web surfing and a word processor, those savings on what you don't need can easily be hundreds of dollars.

If you are not in the US and the broadband routers are a lot more expensive, then perhaps the ratios between Apple and Dell, HP, etc. are also different. When I wander through my local CompUSA or Fry's I do see a marked difference in the price for what you get.

The power and cooling costs of all of these newer high performance systems is significant.

I've done system replacement upgrades where I've tripled performance, halved power consumption and BTU output and quartered floor space, while at the same time reducing operational costs from lease and maintenance contracts by thousands of dollars a year.

System uptime reliability doesn't change much since these systems had multiple levels of redundancy and fault tolerance both before and after the upgrades.

When you work in large data center environments you realize the amount of power distribution and air conditioning that is required, particularly when you are a hardware type and have an in depth knowledge of those systems.

UPS systems feeding 600 amp three phase buss bars to multiple PDUs are pretty damned impressive as are 4MW banks of diesel generators with

40,000 gallon fuel tanks, and that is at one of the smaller sites.

The big stuff is a lot of fun to play with.

Pete C.

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Pete C.
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John Scheldroup
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John Scheldroup

Actually that is a history of modern GUI lineage, not OS lineage, they are two entirely different things. As can be readily seen in the Unix (and VMS) world a single OS can have a number of different optional UIs. It is an excellent article though.

I am quite admittedly biased against the MAC UI since it does not fit my though / work process.

Where I am not biased is at the OS level and the pre OS-X MAC OS, not UI was indeed inferior to the Windows OS at the time. Today with OS-X and the BSD OS that it really is, they are pretty comparable.

If I were to run a BSD OS system, I would choose the CDE UI over the MAC UI since it suits my process far better. For reference, I do have VMS, Solaris and Tru64 systems at home in addition to the Windows ones.

Significantly better than OS9 for sure, but not significantly better or worse than on W2K or XP. Again I'm making the differentiation between the OS and the UI. Whether you are using the OS-X UI or one of the others available for BSD, it is still a BSD system. BSD and Windows are both quite capable of memory management and multitasking.

As far as your performance issues when multitasking on your PC vs. MAC, I'm not sure where that problem lies, but it is not inherent to Windows.

I regularly have TurboCAD, Mach3, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Netscape and a couple copies of Windows explorer open and have no issues under W2Kpro on a P3/500 other than a bit of paging activity since it only has

128MB RAM. If I open Photoshop Elements2 it will gag briefly since it seems that Photoshop is just a giant memory hog. Once it's loaded all it's baggage things run just fine again.

Actually I've got one of those Dell Precision towers, a 410 to be precise. That's the machine where I have my dual display with a Matrox G400 and do some of my CAD work. It also has my DVD burner, DLT tape drive, flatbed scanner and a memory card reader.

I got that machine used for next to nothing and added the various bits and pieces I had on hand to it so I've had it apart a number of times. I also have several Dell Optiplex GXxxx machines that I use for various things such as my web server / vru server, my CNC router control system, and one on my electronics bench to run the PIC programmer and various other stuff.

While these Dell machines don't quite compare to the physical quality of the midrange machines I work with, I have not noticed any significant flaws in them either.

I haven't personally taken apart a G5, but from what I've seen of them they did not appear to be substantially better than the Dells.

Lack of cables does not equal reliability, while connectors are indeed the largest failure point in anything electronic, quality connectors are pretty reliable. In fact poorly done attempts to eliminate the cable bundles can either make a system unserviceable or unreliable.

Those cables in the Dell are basically two things, connections to HDD(s) and power connections. Either you hard solder everything and make the system completely unserviceable, or you eliminate the ribbon cable, but retain the connectors by directly docking onto the system board. Both options also remove the strain and vibration buffering ability of the ribbon cable and if done poorly can make things less reliable.

Neither the Dell or the MAC come close to the level of engineering and quality in a $100k Alphaserver GS160 or for that matter a good old VAX

7860. The ZIF connectors on the XMI backplane in that VAX are a beautiful thing, and that 14 slot backplane alone cost more than either the Dell or the MAC.

Pete C.

Reply to
Pete C.

I am indeed comparing two different time frames because they are when the respective companies dealt with the same issue. I'm comparing the two companies approaches to trying to insure product compatibility and stability, not comparing the products themselves.

Pete C.

Reply to
Pete C.

If I work on a transfer large files with my server or other client on the network, I am very happy to have gigabit networking. In this case faster is better. Saying it is OK to work with 100mb is like me saying why would anyone need a HD over 10MB which is what my first powerbook

100 had 12 or so years ago. Capacity will be used if it is there. Who thought we would want to download movies realtime over the internet... but that is what people want - 56k does not cut it anymore. So building the new advanced tech into the hardware adds useful life to the hardware. as I said before, my old macs are more relevant and useful today than my equally old PCs.

Well, if I look around my studio, and those of adjacent companies, we all have iPods (firewire, but USB works too), Firewire scanners (speed for large images) firewire webcams, and of course external hard drives. Remember USB 2 is a fairly recent thing, and is competitive with firewire 400, not the newer 800. USB1 is unusable for external HD and scanners if you need something that is a decent speed or quality. And also USB1 is a painful process for iPod as well - too slow!

Also, my sony camcorder is abut 400-500USD. Not exactly pro-sumer by any stretch.

Well, this was exactly the argument when the original mac came out in

1984, and everyone thought that graphic design would go to hell because everyone would try and put every font on the documents and make it look like trash. Well, not we know that the designers work for apple, and the hacks work for MS ;-)) Kidding!!!!

But seriously, I think anyone can use a hammer. Some have the skill and talent, and some don't. It just makes the market broader. In the end, I think this is a good thing.

Lack of preparation and training is a common illness.

Right.

Huh? What do you mean? streaming it to a projector?

Again, what do you mean? to what are you talking about outputting to?

Are you talking about dropped frames? What kind of glitch in an all digital process do you mean?

It is not the same at all. Really. Please have a look at this video example (direct link)

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Note that where they use F keys, you can also set each corner of your display to be a custom "hot" spot that you can simply mouse to and it triggers the action.

Again, ease of use. How do you handle a PC laptop when travelling. Again, like my situation where I have about 10 different network settings for various locations, each switching from fixed IP, different internet providers, DHCP... even some that simply turn off all network devices to save power when traveling. At the moment, I think this does not exist on the PC. Or if it does, it is another 3rd party solution that may or may not work reliably.

I agree, SHCP would be easier now in my new studio location. Earlier I was in another shared environment, and my network wis linked to another company's network simply to access their Canon digital copier. It was necessary to ensure that our networks had some degree of security. Now it is not necessary, and next upgrade I will probably change it.

In Switzerland the providers require you only use "approved" kit, and it just happens that approved kit costs a lot more.

And the cost goes down when it is standard in every computer. Also remember it is easer for the manufacturer to manage support if they know that the customer has a defined set of features. I know that my hatred of floppy drives made me insist on not having them them on my PC (that was hard to achieve!). I remember once need to call support, and they told me to use the floppy drive. I laughed.

Another example of better tech is good to have - OSX 10.4, the latest version is distributed on DVD. What are you going to do if all you have is a CD drive? Of course, this has been a problem for some users with systems older than 3 years (and you can order it on CD if necessary). I do not want to buy the bare minimim that I need - I generally will buy what will grow with me, without me being nickeled and dimed to death later.

True, I thought my 10GB hard drive was enough. Now every time I upload pictures from my 7.2mp camera, I ad about 1.2 - 2 gigabytes per image. Many people never think of these things... and it does add up. I have friends who have kids. this instant they say "oh, I'll get a video camera and edit on my computer" I always ask what kit they have... if it is a mac, they usually are all set. If it is a PC, they will have to upgrade hardware and software to achieve the same thing.

True. And that is the default (actually 512 is now) in most macs.

I do not say there should not be options. But if you look across the entire apple product line, there is nothing that you can do on the high end G5, that you cannot do (more slowly) on the low end iBook, or eMac. The OS, and hardware components are consistant. That is the beauty. And web surfing these days is turning into a intense graphics and video oriented experience... so low spec is not so ideal.

I am from the US, but lived in Europe for 13 years. I also always check online US prices.

When you have the budget - go to town!!! :-)

Daniel

Reply to
daniel

Greuzi Daniel,

I think your math is off a bit... Unless you're using some unheard of color depth.

7.2 megapixels, in TIFF (uncompressed) format at a color depth of 24 bits/pixel (3 bytes/pixel) would be 7.2megs x 3 or around 21.6 megs per image... Even at 32 bits/pixel it would only be around 29 megs/image. Or are you talking about video?

-- Ciao,

--Mitch

Reply to
Mitch

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