As you have said, there are about a million different countries that have nasty governments.
We can't afford to take out all of them.
So we take out those that are threatening to America. As a collateral benefit, we manage to destroy a despicable regime or two.
I think it's moral to take out all of the bad regimes you mention. But it's not practical because we'd have to increase the defence budget by 1000%.
So we have to stick to the countries that are the worst, both as belligerents and as bad regimes. And another factor is whether we can do it with minimal casualties, as we have in Iraq.
Iraq fulfulled all these requirements perfectly. I don't see such a clear-cut case for war being likely at any other time within our lifetime, although North Korea comes close if they keep on selling WMD to hostile actors.
Would you deny that Saddam is a belligerent SOB who has threatened the US constantly and with considerable malice?
If you concede that point, the intervention was hardly arbitrary. If you hit a guy and hit him and hit him, should you be surprised if he fights back?
Do you feel the Iraqi people would have been better off under Saddam, who was killing them at a rate of 21,000-odd a year?
War is a horrible thing, and it can only be supported under extreme circumstances. But that doesn't mean extreme circumstances don't occasionally exist.
The only person on the planet even remotely similar to Saddam is Kim Jong Il of North Korea. He has threatened us in similarly belligerent ways, and his people are starving. Unfortunately, thanks to the close proximity of South Korea, a war with them is a much more ticklish proposition.
Now, it's true that these threats are not backed up all that well right now. But there's no question that Saddam and Kim have been tinkering with nuclear weapons. I would prefer to see their governments taken out before they use them.
So I would support war with North Korea, but only if we could figure out a way to deal with the collateral damage, which could be enormous.
I have no doubt that, even if Saddam's program wasn't in place at the time of the invasion, he would have continued it after he slid out of the intense glare of publicity. As a result, I feel he represented a genuine threat, even if it was not immediate.
I would probably not support an invasion of Zimbabwe or China because those countries present no threat to us at this time. They are not belligerents. Castro's Cuba is an interesting borderline case. I've been there, and the people are not well off. He has been supporting Hugo Chavez' nasty Veneuzelian government. But I don't think a bloody war is the answer; waiting for Fidel to die is probably the least harmful solution.
I fear you could say similar things about every cabinet run by every president since the beginning of time.
At least Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield liberated Iraq and Afghanistan from really, really horrible governments, an achievement I think the left gives far too little credit to.
Things are not perfect in Iraq today, but they're getting better by the day.
I think many on the left have no conception of how horrible life in Iraq was under Saddam. I had no choice but to support this war, because I understood this.
True. In the "bad old days" it was a lot harder to learn stuff like that.
Of course if you know of a MacOS X xemacs port that supports Cocoa fonts, I'd love you forever. I'm very disappointed with the continued fixed-font or ugly font (X-windows reliant) versions of emacs:-(
When I bought my dual G5/2ghz from The Apple Store at The Grove last Wednesday, they told me this FireWire drive system has finally been scrapped in favour of an automated solution they've put together.
I guess $10 or whatever it costs a day starts to add up after a while.
This isn't that uncommon anymore. At a recent O"Reilly conference, most of the laptops were PowerBooks. Even our fearless leader CmdrTaco owns one. Apple's share of the laptop market has soared from 5% to 7% - that doesn't seem like much, but in percentage terms that's a 40% jump.
Back in the late 90s I was using a mixed network with SGI for web development, some Linux, and a Windows machine to run commercial software such as Photoshop.
Then I struck out on my own for a while, and for financial reasons I used Linux for my own stuff and Windows because clients demanded it. (I still really liked the SGI GUI design a lot more).
An interest in video production and editing got me my first Mac in 1998, a beige G3/266. I upgraded to a G4/450 dual processor in 2000. I found MacOS 9 very appealing, but since it didn't run emacs, it could not be my primary development machine.
When MacOS X came out, I started switching all my personal computing to MacOS X, because I loved the look and feel of it, and it still ran all my web software developed for Linux. At that point, I could do all the development I would ever need on one machine. I was sold on the Mac environment at that point.
When I switched jobs in 2000 to a company that let me develop web software for Linux, it looked like my situation was pretty stable. But in 2003, after one too many security breaches, I got the okay to switch our web system from Linux to MacOS X.
To bring us bang up to date, I took delivery of my personal G5/2ghz dual processor machine last Wednesday. Wonderful system.
Of all the operating systems and environments I've used, from Sun and SGI to every version of Windows imaginable (most of them, of course, better left unimagined), MacOS X is by far the best. It's lovely to look at without tweaking, it has a designer flair that's extremely appealing, and it runs all the software I could ever need (Unix + Macintosh).
I'm not saying it's flawless; nothing is. But it's the closest thing I've seen yet, and I don't see any major threats to it as the best designed and conceived operating environment around.
MIT-MC was the newest (now, least ancient) computer running the legendary Incompatible Timesharing System. Sadly, that means it's been long since shut down, and because of that I don't think the address could work even if other aspects of the address space still functioned.
I spent some of my childhood years around RMS and the AI lab, and I can say that he's changed remarkably little over the years.
As I told my then-girlfriend, "A bit intense but really not a bad guy".
It's impossible not to respect and admire his impeccable integrity towards principles that are extremely difficult to uphold in the real world.
I suspect most who use his software - and I use emacs every day - also violate his principles every day. As I do, by using MacOS X to type this message about him. As I remember, at one time he had such a vendetta against Apple that he prohibited people from porting emacs to MacOS. Since there's an emacs now on MacOS X, even if it's just a straight window system free BSD port, one would think the breach is healed. If it is, it's just because Darwin's open source.
We can complain about his faults all we want, but it's not impossible to think that without the cranky guy, we wouldn't have Linux, and the Unix world would not be enjoying the resurgence it has been enjoying. For that, and the Emacs editor, I salute him.
Of course without Linux, *BSD might have played a similar role, with its free copies of ls, grep and so on. But the culture of BSD seems to have made it much more of a niche product. For creating Linux, we thank Linus; for creating the foundation and framework of Linux, we must thank RMS.
I don't call it GNU/Linux because the name, quite frankly, sounds too lumpy. But it is that in spirit, and for that RMS deserves a tremendous amount of credit, whether HURD eventually emerges or not.
I have a Redhat 9 system, which I think still qualifies as recent.
I have a Trackpoint keyboard that has a two-button mouse. I realize most of my problems would go away if I had a three-button mouse because the middle button is fairly consistent as paste. Unfortunately, I don't remember ever seeing a three-button mouse on a non-Unix system, so I think it's fair to evaluate the user interface based on the far more common two-button arrangement.
With this setup, baffling inconsistencies in cut and paste were undeniably the rule, not the exception, when I was using this system.
When I switched to MacOS X for my corporate desktop, my productivity and overall happiness with my system soared, even though I couldn't use my TrackPoint keyboard:-( and had only a single-button mouse.
I saw a Civic Hybrid on the road yesterday. It looked like it had a tapered rear which vaguely resembled other high-efficiency vehicles, but I suspect that's a change that was carried on to all Civics.
I wouldn't have known it wasn't a normal Civic if it didn't say it was a hybrid.
Isn't that amazing? You post something on Slashdot about one of the world's most (deservedly) obscure products, and you run into someone who's actually heard of it.
Please do drop me an email - my address is as listed in Slashdot. I doubt there are many people here who are interested.
I am a one-man IT department at a Los Angeles-based company with about 150 employees. I do pretty much everything that's even vaguely related to IT.
Recently, in only vaguely IT-related stuff, I have worked on the renewal of our phone system support contract, figuring out if an upgrade to our phone system is really necessary, and fighting with the phone system people over incredibly bad terms in a contract. (For example, when they upgrade the system from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000, they deliver the upgraded system unpatched (!). I told them to patch it as part of their agreement and they said NO NO NO and I said YES YES YES and they finally bent, sort of[*]).
My main job is to develop and maintain my Linux-based CRM+web ordering system that I developed myself. I want to move it to MacOS X to make security administration easier, and that's been taking a lot of my time. But so has developing new software to communicate with a new distribution partner.
We're also replacing our Exchange server (required because of the Windows-based phone system:-( ), and I'm coordinating the contractors doing this.
Finally, when someone's workstation fails or gets a virus or whatever, I have to help him, her or it out. I am incredibly irritated at all the Windows problems that come up, because they distract me from productive work. If I ran the company, nobody, and I mean nobody, would be using Windows. Ugh.
When I feel overstressed, I calm down by reading and writing on a whole bunch of sites, including Slashdot. Slashdot is also work-related because it alerts me to the worst security holes, new directions in computing I should be aware of, and the like.
Recently, I'd say fully 50% of my time has been spent on supervising contractors of various types, but that's extremely unusual. Most of the time I am working on projects on our CRM system and helping users with problems. But recently there has been a lot of supervision. For the most part, I consider it an interesting change of pace, especially since management is understanding about it delaying the other projects I'm supposed to do.
Except for now, when our Exchange server is being replaced next weekend, there's relatively little overtime except during emergencies. But then again, our business is a 8-3 business, more or less.
Hope that helps.
D
[*] (Yes, our phone system runs under Windows. It's called Interactive Intelligence, and I'll give you a free clue: Don't buy it. Don't argue that it's bad because it runs Windows, even though that, too, is true. Instead, argue that it's bad because maintenance is incredibly expensive, non-responsive and our VAR maintaining it is desperate for revenues. It also appears to require a complete hardware replacement every five years or so, which is not long for something costing as much as a house in a crummy area of Southern California. Because many of the support problems, including quasi-compulsory upgrades, are thanks to the software developer and not the VAR, I cannot recommend buying this software even if you find a better VAR than we did).
Why do you feel that it's somehow immoral to waste computer power, when most people use computers to surf the web, write documents and deal with their email? None of those functions take more than a tiny share of a modern CPU.
I administrate a network of Windows machines (the one exception being the Macs and Linux systems I use for software development for the company). I notice that everyone loves the extra eye candy, whether it be a huge desktop image or things like HotBar and the like. Those things slow down computers hugely, but in the real world, users love them and do not want to see them gone.
Personally, I want to see beautiful fonts and perfectly anti-aliased text, even though I know these things sap power like crazy. But they make it easier and more enjoyable for me, and in the end, my viewpoint is that this is exactly why we have powerful computers in the first place.
As long as our typical desktop computers aren't using After Effects or doing long renders with Final Cut Pro (as my home machines do), what's the problem with "waste" of CPU?
I don't know of any widely used operating systems that are NOT bloated. Clearly bloat is what the modern OS consumer wants.
Personally, I love the MacOS X eye candy because it just looks good. I find that it makes me feel better overall, which is a very nice plus if you think about the amount of time most of us spend in front of our monitors.
My company's PowerMac G4/1.25 dual processor and my PowerBook G4/1.0ghz are both very snappy machines, I assume largely due to successful offloading of display tasks to their graphics cards. Is this somehow morally wrong?
I like and appreciate beauty in design, so for me the MacOS X GUI is a big winner now that it doesn't slow the machine down, as it used to in older machines.
I'm in the same boat except I haven't tried it yet. Would a PS/2 to USB adapter work for a PS/2 Trackpoint keyboard?
What is the third party utility and how does it work?
I don't mind using a mouse so much as I miss the wonderful clicky feel of the IBM keyboard. The Apple keyboard has awful feel (at least to me) and occasionally misses keystrokes. For example, I have to take special care to make sure I hit the shift key just right or my capital letters come out lowercase.
If using it, or even looking at it, gives you joy, and you have the bucks, what's the harm?
You're helping keep Apple in business, so it can make more cool things, so you can buy them. If we stop buying them, then they can't make cool things anymore:-(.
That being said, for my purposes, anything that increases real time capacity and reduces rendering time in Final Cut is bound to pay off big-time. And, judging by the rest of the responses, most serious PowerMac users feel the same way.
Nice try. In 1998, when I bought my first Mac, it was by far the best solution for digital video. People with PCs had to suffer through a ton of flakiness just to set up their systems, much less get anything done with them. I was editing video almost out of the box.
Shortly after I got my system, the iMac came up and really introduced desktop video to the masses with the iMac DV.
Back in those days, if you wanted the best computing had to offer, you needed a Mac for video, a PC for work and a Unix box for web stuff. Now you can put all those functions into a Mac and still do well.
These are happy days for Mac fans. It's not the world's most popular computer, but it's by far the best in terms of usability and fun.
I would assume the best way to sell the song would be to ask Apple to transfer it to another iTunes account. Since you can't open an iTunes account outside the US, that makes it impossible to own outside of the US.
So there's no profit potential in the way you described.
Of course since he's making a 279% profit right now, I don't think that concerns him a lot:-).
See the original article; it was saying that the new dual G5s would get a cinebench score of 500, about the same as the current score of the 2.4ghz models.
We'll just have to wait and see for something more real-worldish.
D
Re:What about Panther gains for the G4s?
on
Comparative G5/G4 Tests
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is true, and a Bad Thing, and I make no excuses for it at all.
At the same time, it's either take the speed increases and live with the lower drive count, or don't take the speed increases. And remember, FireWire 800 should finally be fast enough for video editing, especially on a separate bus from the output device.
I could get whatever case I wanted if I switched to the PC world, but then I would have to deal with tiresome Windows problems, and I wouldn't get to use Final Cut Pro, still the best video editing software there is.
If that makes me a slave to Steve's fashion sense... well, I have to admit Johnathan Ive and friends surely have a fine touch.
What's the price comparison between the G5 and dual Xeon?
Okay, I'm not going to be lazy. I went to Dell.com and configured a 2.4ghz Dual Xeon with Windows XP, 512mb RAM, a DVD drive and a modem. This is roughly the same configuration offered by the G5.
Price is $2,801.
So the Mac is about $200 more than a system with about the same performance once the Mac is optimized.
It's not going to convince me to use Windows (ugh!), but it's not as good as we were hoping either.
D
Re:What about Panther gains for the G4s?
on
Comparative G5/G4 Tests
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know if they'll actually ship that machine.
But MacWarehouse, as of last week, had about 20 of them left at under $1,700. My company bought one for me. It's a great machine, and the bang per buck is unbeatable.
I'm getting a G5 for my home, but that's because I do heavy video editing and effects, which should benefit a LOT from the faster system.
But for most things the dual G4's still a great system, especially at that price.
Slashdot Mirror
See my answers to the other person who replied.
Enjoy!
D
As you have said, there are about a million different countries that have nasty governments.
We can't afford to take out all of them.
So we take out those that are threatening to America. As a collateral benefit, we manage to destroy a despicable regime or two.
I think it's moral to take out all of the bad regimes you mention. But it's not practical because we'd have to increase the defence budget by 1000%.
So we have to stick to the countries that are the worst, both as belligerents and as bad regimes. And another factor is whether we can do it with minimal casualties, as we have in Iraq.
Iraq fulfulled all these requirements perfectly. I don't see such a clear-cut case for war being likely at any other time within our lifetime, although North Korea comes close if they keep on selling WMD to hostile actors.
D
Of course I understood that.
Would you deny that Saddam is a belligerent SOB who has threatened the US constantly and with considerable malice?
If you concede that point, the intervention was hardly arbitrary. If you hit a guy and hit him and hit him, should you be surprised if he fights back?
Do you feel the Iraqi people would have been better off under Saddam, who was killing them at a rate of 21,000-odd a year?
War is a horrible thing, and it can only be supported under extreme circumstances. But that doesn't mean extreme circumstances don't occasionally exist.
The only person on the planet even remotely similar to Saddam is Kim Jong Il of North Korea. He has threatened us in similarly belligerent ways, and his people are starving. Unfortunately, thanks to the close proximity of South Korea, a war with them is a much more ticklish proposition.
Now, it's true that these threats are not backed up all that well right now. But there's no question that Saddam and Kim have been tinkering with nuclear weapons. I would prefer to see their governments taken out before they use them.
So I would support war with North Korea, but only if we could figure out a way to deal with the collateral damage, which could be enormous.
I have no doubt that, even if Saddam's program wasn't in place at the time of the invasion, he would have continued it after he slid out of the intense glare of publicity. As a result, I feel he represented a genuine threat, even if it was not immediate.
I would probably not support an invasion of Zimbabwe or China because those countries present no threat to us at this time. They are not belligerents. Castro's Cuba is an interesting borderline case. I've been there, and the people are not well off. He has been supporting Hugo Chavez' nasty Veneuzelian government. But I don't think a bloody war is the answer; waiting for Fidel to die is probably the least harmful solution.
Hope that helps clarify my views.
D
I fear you could say similar things about every cabinet run by every president since the beginning of time.
At least Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield liberated Iraq and Afghanistan from really, really horrible governments, an achievement I think the left gives far too little credit to.
Things are not perfect in Iraq today, but they're getting better by the day.
I think many on the left have no conception of how horrible life in Iraq was under Saddam. I had no choice but to support this war, because I understood this.
D
True. In the "bad old days" it was a lot harder to learn stuff like that.
:-(
Of course if you know of a MacOS X xemacs port that supports Cocoa fonts, I'd love you forever. I'm very disappointed with the continued fixed-font or ugly font (X-windows reliant) versions of emacs
D
When I bought my dual G5/2ghz from The Apple Store at The Grove last Wednesday, they told me this FireWire drive system has finally been scrapped in favour of an automated solution they've put together.
I guess $10 or whatever it costs a day starts to add up after a while.
D
This isn't that uncommon anymore. At a recent O"Reilly conference, most of the laptops were PowerBooks. Even our fearless leader CmdrTaco owns one. Apple's share of the laptop market has soared from 5% to 7% - that doesn't seem like much, but in percentage terms that's a 40% jump.
Back in the late 90s I was using a mixed network with SGI for web development, some Linux, and a Windows machine to run commercial software such as Photoshop.
Then I struck out on my own for a while, and for financial reasons I used Linux for my own stuff and Windows because clients demanded it. (I still really liked the SGI GUI design a lot more).
An interest in video production and editing got me my first Mac in 1998, a beige G3/266. I upgraded to a G4/450 dual processor in 2000. I found MacOS 9 very appealing, but since it didn't run emacs, it could not be my primary development machine.
When MacOS X came out, I started switching all my personal computing to MacOS X, because I loved the look and feel of it, and it still ran all my web software developed for Linux. At that point, I could do all the development I would ever need on one machine. I was sold on the Mac environment at that point.
When I switched jobs in 2000 to a company that let me develop web software for Linux, it looked like my situation was pretty stable. But in 2003, after one too many security breaches, I got the okay to switch our web system from Linux to MacOS X.
To bring us bang up to date, I took delivery of my personal G5/2ghz dual processor machine last Wednesday. Wonderful system.
Of all the operating systems and environments I've used, from Sun and SGI to every version of Windows imaginable (most of them, of course, better left unimagined), MacOS X is by far the best. It's lovely to look at without tweaking, it has a designer flair that's extremely appealing, and it runs all the software I could ever need (Unix + Macintosh).
I'm not saying it's flawless; nothing is. But it's the closest thing I've seen yet, and I don't see any major threats to it as the best designed and conceived operating environment around.
Hope that helps.
D
MIT-MC was the newest (now, least ancient) computer running the legendary Incompatible Timesharing System. Sadly, that means it's been long since shut down, and because of that I don't think the address could work even if other aspects of the address space still functioned.
I spent some of my childhood years around RMS and the AI lab, and I can say that he's changed remarkably little over the years.
As I told my then-girlfriend, "A bit intense but really not a bad guy".
It's impossible not to respect and admire his impeccable integrity towards principles that are extremely difficult to uphold in the real world.
I suspect most who use his software - and I use emacs every day - also violate his principles every day. As I do, by using MacOS X to type this message about him. As I remember, at one time he had such a vendetta against Apple that he prohibited people from porting emacs to MacOS. Since there's an emacs now on MacOS X, even if it's just a straight window system free BSD port, one would think the breach is healed. If it is, it's just because Darwin's open source.
We can complain about his faults all we want, but it's not impossible to think that without the cranky guy, we wouldn't have Linux, and the Unix world would not be enjoying the resurgence it has been enjoying. For that, and the Emacs editor, I salute him.
Of course without Linux, *BSD might have played a similar role, with its free copies of ls, grep and so on. But the culture of BSD seems to have made it much more of a niche product. For creating Linux, we thank Linus; for creating the foundation and framework of Linux, we must thank RMS.
I don't call it GNU/Linux because the name, quite frankly, sounds too lumpy. But it is that in spirit, and for that RMS deserves a tremendous amount of credit, whether HURD eventually emerges or not.
D
What I noticed right away is that it looks almost identical to the iPod, down to the font of the display.
I wonder if this is designed and manufacturered by the same people who did the iPod?
The controls don't look as well thought out as the iPod, but otherwise it's quite the ripoff.
D
An excellent point, although I wonder how many people trying Linux realize it.
:-(.
I happen to be very fond of an old TrackPoint keyboard with neither scroll wheel nor three button mouse, so I'm sort of stuck
D
I have a Redhat 9 system, which I think still qualifies as recent.
:-( and had only a single-button mouse.
I have a Trackpoint keyboard that has a two-button mouse. I realize most of my problems would go away if I had a three-button mouse because the middle button is fairly consistent as paste. Unfortunately, I don't remember ever seeing a three-button mouse on a non-Unix system, so I think it's fair to evaluate the user interface based on the far more common two-button arrangement.
With this setup, baffling inconsistencies in cut and paste were undeniably the rule, not the exception, when I was using this system.
When I switched to MacOS X for my corporate desktop, my productivity and overall happiness with my system soared, even though I couldn't use my TrackPoint keyboard
Like it or not.
D
I saw a Civic Hybrid on the road yesterday. It looked like it had a tapered rear which vaguely resembled other high-efficiency vehicles, but I suspect that's a change that was carried on to all Civics.
I wouldn't have known it wasn't a normal Civic if it didn't say it was a hybrid.
D
Isn't that amazing? You post something on Slashdot about one of the world's most (deservedly) obscure products, and you run into someone who's actually heard of it.
Please do drop me an email - my address is as listed in Slashdot. I doubt there are many people here who are interested.
D
I am a one-man IT department at a Los Angeles-based company with about 150 employees. I do pretty much everything that's even vaguely related to IT.
:-( ), and I'm coordinating the contractors doing this.
Recently, in only vaguely IT-related stuff, I have worked on the renewal of our phone system support contract, figuring out if an upgrade to our phone system is really necessary, and fighting with the phone system people over incredibly bad terms in a contract. (For example, when they upgrade the system from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000, they deliver the upgraded system unpatched (!). I told them to patch it as part of their agreement and they said NO NO NO and I said YES YES YES and they finally bent, sort of[*]).
My main job is to develop and maintain my Linux-based CRM+web ordering system that I developed myself. I want to move it to MacOS X to make security administration easier, and that's been taking a lot of my time. But so has developing new software to communicate with a new distribution partner.
We're also replacing our Exchange server (required because of the Windows-based phone system
Finally, when someone's workstation fails or gets a virus or whatever, I have to help him, her or it out. I am incredibly irritated at all the Windows problems that come up, because they distract me from productive work. If I ran the company, nobody, and I mean nobody, would be using Windows. Ugh.
When I feel overstressed, I calm down by reading and writing on a whole bunch of sites, including Slashdot. Slashdot is also work-related because it alerts me to the worst security holes, new directions in computing I should be aware of, and the like.
Recently, I'd say fully 50% of my time has been spent on supervising contractors of various types, but that's extremely unusual. Most of the time I am working on projects on our CRM system and helping users with problems. But recently there has been a lot of supervision. For the most part, I consider it an interesting change of pace, especially since management is understanding about it delaying the other projects I'm supposed to do.
Except for now, when our Exchange server is being replaced next weekend, there's relatively little overtime except during emergencies. But then again, our business is a 8-3 business, more or less.
Hope that helps.
D
[*] (Yes, our phone system runs under Windows. It's called Interactive Intelligence, and I'll give you a free clue: Don't buy it. Don't argue that it's bad because it runs Windows, even though that, too, is true. Instead, argue that it's bad because maintenance is incredibly expensive, non-responsive and our VAR maintaining it is desperate for revenues. It also appears to require a complete hardware replacement every five years or so, which is not long for something costing as much as a house in a crummy area of Southern California. Because many of the support problems, including quasi-compulsory upgrades, are thanks to the software developer and not the VAR, I cannot recommend buying this software even if you find a better VAR than we did).
Why do you feel that it's somehow immoral to waste computer power, when most people use computers to surf the web, write documents and deal with their email? None of those functions take more than a tiny share of a modern CPU.
I administrate a network of Windows machines (the one exception being the Macs and Linux systems I use for software development for the company). I notice that everyone loves the extra eye candy, whether it be a huge desktop image or things like HotBar and the like. Those things slow down computers hugely, but in the real world, users love them and do not want to see them gone.
Personally, I want to see beautiful fonts and perfectly anti-aliased text, even though I know these things sap power like crazy. But they make it easier and more enjoyable for me, and in the end, my viewpoint is that this is exactly why we have powerful computers in the first place.
As long as our typical desktop computers aren't using After Effects or doing long renders with Final Cut Pro (as my home machines do), what's the problem with "waste" of CPU?
D
I don't know of any widely used operating systems that are NOT bloated. Clearly bloat is what the modern OS consumer wants.
Personally, I love the MacOS X eye candy because it just looks good. I find that it makes me feel better overall, which is a very nice plus if you think about the amount of time most of us spend in front of our monitors.
My company's PowerMac G4/1.25 dual processor and my PowerBook G4/1.0ghz are both very snappy machines, I assume largely due to successful offloading of display tasks to their graphics cards. Is this somehow morally wrong?
I like and appreciate beauty in design, so for me the MacOS X GUI is a big winner now that it doesn't slow the machine down, as it used to in older machines.
D
You are right, but that's not a consumer priced solution like the iMac DV is. In the consumer space, I'd still say the Mac was first.
I'll bet you don't know many, if any, people who bought Toasters who weren't in the video biz in some capacity.
D
I'm in the same boat except I haven't tried it yet. Would a PS/2 to USB adapter work for a PS/2 Trackpoint keyboard?
What is the third party utility and how does it work?
I don't mind using a mouse so much as I miss the wonderful clicky feel of the IBM keyboard. The Apple keyboard has awful feel (at least to me) and occasionally misses keystrokes. For example, I have to take special care to make sure I hit the shift key just right or my capital letters come out lowercase.
Thanks for the information!
D
If using it, or even looking at it, gives you joy, and you have the bucks, what's the harm?
:-(.
You're helping keep Apple in business, so it can make more cool things, so you can buy them. If we stop buying them, then they can't make cool things anymore
That being said, for my purposes, anything that increases real time capacity and reduces rendering time in Final Cut is bound to pay off big-time. And, judging by the rest of the responses, most serious PowerMac users feel the same way.
D
Nice try. In 1998, when I bought my first Mac, it was by far the best solution for digital video. People with PCs had to suffer through a ton of flakiness just to set up their systems, much less get anything done with them. I was editing video almost out of the box.
Shortly after I got my system, the iMac came up and really introduced desktop video to the masses with the iMac DV.
Back in those days, if you wanted the best computing had to offer, you needed a Mac for video, a PC for work and a Unix box for web stuff. Now you can put all those functions into a Mac and still do well.
These are happy days for Mac fans. It's not the world's most popular computer, but it's by far the best in terms of usability and fun.
D
I would assume the best way to sell the song would be to ask Apple to transfer it to another iTunes account. Since you can't open an iTunes account outside the US, that makes it impossible to own outside of the US.
:-).
So there's no profit potential in the way you described.
Of course since he's making a 279% profit right now, I don't think that concerns him a lot
D
See the original article; it was saying that the new dual G5s would get a cinebench score of 500, about the same as the current score of the 2.4ghz models.
We'll just have to wait and see for something more real-worldish.
D
This is true, and a Bad Thing, and I make no excuses for it at all.
... well, I have to admit Johnathan Ive and friends surely have a fine touch.
At the same time, it's either take the speed increases and live with the lower drive count, or don't take the speed increases. And remember, FireWire 800 should finally be fast enough for video editing, especially on a separate bus from the output device.
I could get whatever case I wanted if I switched to the PC world, but then I would have to deal with tiresome Windows problems, and I wouldn't get to use Final Cut Pro, still the best video editing software there is.
If that makes me a slave to Steve's fashion sense
D
What's the price comparison between the G5 and dual Xeon?
Okay, I'm not going to be lazy. I went to Dell.com and configured a 2.4ghz Dual Xeon with Windows XP, 512mb RAM, a DVD drive and a modem. This is roughly the same configuration offered by the G5.
Price is $2,801.
So the Mac is about $200 more than a system with about the same performance once the Mac is optimized.
It's not going to convince me to use Windows (ugh!), but it's not as good as we were hoping either.
D
I don't know if they'll actually ship that machine.
But MacWarehouse, as of last week, had about 20 of them left at under $1,700. My company bought one for me. It's a great machine, and the bang per buck is unbeatable.
I'm getting a G5 for my home, but that's because I do heavy video editing and effects, which should benefit a LOT from the faster system.
But for most things the dual G4's still a great system, especially at that price.
D