Re:We had to deal with this...
on
Less Might Be More
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No, not period. She doesn't want or need to use new technology. She wants to use the same technology she's been using for the past two years. The machine was perfectly capable of doing anything she needed. Sure, it may not have been blazingly fast, but she didn't care and had better things to spend $500 on. She didn't upgrade because she wanted to play 3D games, a "better internet experience" or because she was dissatisfied with the computer's speed. She upgraded because BellSouth's software made a blanket assumption that any machine slower than, say, 300 MHz ain't fast enough.
The crux of my argument is that the machine far exceeded all system requirements when we first signed up for 1 Mbit DSL back in 2002. All they required then was any Pentium or PowerPC and 32 MB of RAM. Her DSL hasn't changed--it's still the same ol' 1Mbit service!
The only thing it wasn't able to do (for her, mind you) was run the BellSouth software and meet its arbitrary hardware requirements. A PII-class machine is more than sufficient for casual web browsing and word processing.
Get off your high horse.
We had to deal with this...
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My mom was using a 1998-vintage Quantex (remember them?) PII/266 with 128 MB of RAM quite happily until last month when her DSL modem died. BellSouth sent out a new modem, but the software accompanying it decided that her computer was too slow. After a couple weeks of back and forth with them we just gave up. (I'm a Mac guy and 1000 miles away, so I couldn't help her with XP that much over the phone.)
So I started shopping and found some pretty good deals on Dell's refurb site. I ended up getting her a 2.6 GHz machine with 512 MB of RAM, 40 GB HDD and a 48x CD-RW for $490 shipped. Yeah, it's a Celeron with integrated graphics...but it doesn't matter. She just surfs the web, prints out house plans and stuff and plays solitaire. The 266 MHz machine was more than capable of doing all of this, but the "industry" forced her to upgrade.
I really wanted to get her a Mac so she wouldn't have to deal with viruses and spyware, but couldn't justify spending twice as much for an eMac. I wish Apple made a cheap "pizza box" G4/G5 machine for people who already have decent monitors. (Try telling a mom that she should get rid of a perfectly good 17" monitor....);)
Indeed. When I moved out of my college house, I left my Huffy there in case my old roommates wanted to use it (since I'd bought a DiamondBack).
The other day I got an email from them saying that they'd put the bike down in the garage (the door stays open all the time) and it had been stolen shortly thereafter. Here's what's funny. Apparently the thief had a conscience or was just looking to trade up, 'cause in its place was a ragged-out ghetto cruiser.
We did have a few other interesting things get stolen, including our garden hose and a minifridge (these were outside). But the weirdest thing happened over one Christmas break. Someone broke in and stole the few bottles of liquor we had in the kitchen, but didn't touch any of our TV's (including a 32-incher), DVD player, a Harman/Kardon surround sound system, my PowerMac G4, a PlayStation 2 or anything else expensive.
But for some reason they decided to take my roommate's change jar (had $10 or so in it, tops)....
I'm not arguing with you...just a little friendly debate.:)
While the initial purchase price of a Mac is higher, they stay useful a lot longer than the average PC. My G4's four years old and is still plenty fast running current programs like InDesign CS and the latest release of OS X. I doubt you want to try and run XP on a four year old PC.:)
There are plenty of used G4's on eBay. Good dualies like mine sell for about $500. The only thing you'd probably need would be a new video card, since the Rage 128 Pro that came in them sucks and doesn't support Quartz Extreme. I got a Mac Radeon for $20 on eBay.
And if you know anybody affiliated with a school/college/university, you can get a base dual 1.8 G5 for $1799. That's cheap by Mac standards...my dual 450 was $2200 when it was new back in 7/00.
Actually, it does. Those fat IDE cables strung all over the place do a lot to impede airflow. And if you thought the G4 was neat inside, take a look at the G5.
Also, it's much easier to work on a computer when you're not having to constantly move cables, wires and brackets out of the way.
I've been a Mac user for years and currently use an old dual-processor 450 MHz G4. I realized that Macs are generally better designed inside, but didn't realize that current PCs were this cobbled-together. Compare these two shots:
I have a Sony DVP-NC650V 5-disc DVD/SACD/Video CD player. It cost $199 a year ago. The reason I bought it is because my receiver, an old Harman/Kardon, doesn't have a built-in Dolby Digital or DTS decoder, but does have analog 5.1 channel inputs. This Sony is one of the few players I could find that had 5.1 analog outputs.
I haven't read much about it since, but it is my understanding that SACD players (don't know about DVD-A) do not output multichannel sound via the optical or coaxial connections. You must use three two-channel RCA cables to connect it to the receiver. (Front left, front right, center, surround left, surround right, and subwoofer)
I haven't bought any SACD's yet, but it came with sampler disc--and as the other posters have said, it's awesome. There really is a noticeable difference. The live recordings really sound like you're at a concert.
On OS X, click-and-hold is roughly analagous to right-clicking in many applications. For example, in Mozilla, if you click and hold the left mouse button, a contextual menu appears after a short delay. Likewise, doing the same to an icon in the Dock results in a similar menu, which can vary depending on the particular app.
This functionality is probably due to the fact that Apple only includes a one-button mouse with their systems. Another way to get around this limitation is to CTRL-click. This causes a regular click to become a right-click.
I finally just bit the bullet and bought a Logitech scroller. (It works fine without drivers, BTW.)
It's kind of sad that Lexmark's products have gone into the toilet lately, because their old products were rock-solid. My mom had a 2030 inkjet for a long time and it was great. My 5-year-old laser printer is a Lexmark E310. It's just a compact, 600dpi, 8ppm printer. But the cool part is that it has its own 66 MHz processor, PostScript emulation and some RAM expansion slots (I threw an old 32MB SIMM in there--prints anything now!).
Lexmark has drivers for just about every OS on their site:
Every flavor of Windows back to 3.1 (!)
Every Mac OS from 8.6 onward
AIX
Compaq, DEC & HP-UX
OS/2 2, 3 & Warp
Red Hat 7.2, 7.3 & 9
Assorted SCO stuff
Solaris 7, 8, & 9
Various flavors of Linux
Dell doesn't design its own printers! They're simply run-of-the-mill Lexmark units with a Dell logo. But here's the shady part. The Dell printers are modified so that only the special Dell cartridges fit. The Lexmark cartridges had the same pin configuration, but the Dell cartridge holders are shaped a bit differently. If the cheaper Lexmark (or generic) cart is modified a little bit, they work just fine.
I have a laser printer--but Canon seems to be the best deal in inkjets right now. Black carts for most of their printers are only like $7.
We haven't actually done any reference or control scans. This scanner, however, is a beast. It's built like a tank--with the ADF it weighs about 70 pounds. It automatically focuses and adjusts the optics before each scan job. We haven't experienced any image degradation yet.
We're saving all the images as TIFF files with LZW compression (lossless). The 12" x 18" pages at 300 dpi are around 40-50MB. We scan the yearbook pages (9x12) at 200 dpi grayscale and they are around 2MB per page.
We've undertaken a pretty large archiving job at my university. We're scanning every page of every newspaper we've ever printed (started in 1927) up to the time we have digital archives starting around 1993 or so. We're also scanning about 80 300 page yearbooks. Hopefully this can offer you some help or suggestions.
We have a dual-processor G4 and an Epson 1640XL large-format FireWire scanner with the optional auto document feeder. It's probably a bit out of your budget ($2899 + ~$1200 for the ADF) but it's awesome. It can scan at up to 1600dpi and the ADF can automatically duplex and scan both sides of the page. We're using OmniPage Pro X for OCR software.
Right now we're more concerned with scanning the documents and getting them online, so we haven't started OCR'ing everything yet. But the ADF is awesome. It can scan both sides of all 300+ pages of a yearbook automatically in about 2 1/2 hours.
The newspapers are a bit different. They're getting a bit fragile in their old age so we have to manually scan them. We scan them at 300dpi in full color, so the 12x18 pages are around 50MB per page. But the scanner takes less than a minute per page. It's impressive.
We use Photoshop's web gallery feature to generate the image galleries. Pretty simple really. Let me know if you have any questions.
AFAIK, my university out in BFE isn't connected to Internet2 yet...but our internet speeds are still pretty impressive.
I'm definitely going to miss the connection I have in my office after I graduate in a few days. My G4 is connected via 100Mbps Ethernet to a switch connected directly to the campus fiber-optic backbone. Most sites can't keep up with it...I have about a 17Mbit connection on my desktop, verified by the speed testers on DSLReports.
The 2.5Mbit (~300KBps) Frontiernet DSL I have at home seems kinda pokey in comparison...;)
We tried using Orb drives here at my university for student lab work (graphic arts & multimedia=large files). Sure, the capacity was great, speed was decent and disks were relatively cheap for all the space they provided.
But after about a year all the drives started failing left and right. Brought back memories of the Click of Death from a few years ago.
I just used the monitor's controls to resize the image to have an approximate 1-inch black border all the way around. The display is now effectively 11 inches wide...and when set at 1792x1344...gives an on-screen resolution of 163 dpi.
Man...it looks fantastic! The high-res OS X dock icons and all images > 2 megapixels look amazing.
If your monitor'll do it, try downloading some pix from a high-end camera like a Canon 10D from a site like www.dpreview.com. It'll blow you away.
My 17" Sony FD Trinitron will display 1792x1344 @ 60 Hz. Aside from a little flicker,::grin:: the images from high-end digicams look outstanding. It works out to about 134dpi--almost twice that of a traditional display--and, interestingly, just about enough to get decent printed output in something like a newspaper.
It also supports 1920x1080 (same as the best HDTV) but won't let me smush down the screen image enough to correct the aspect ratio.
I know it's not even remotely comparable, but check out these numbers....kinda interesting.
The standard dual 2 GHz XServe costs $3999 and comes with 1 GB of RAM and 80 GB of disk space. So, if you take a 42U rack and fill it up with dual 2-GHz XServes...
You'll be spending $168,000. That's... 84 processors, 42GB of RAM and 3.36 TB of disk space...seems to compare quite favorably to the other boxen.;)
Surprisingly enough, we have GREAT (~3Mbit) DSL from Frontier out here in the sticks (Statesboro, Georgia).
We pay them $79 a month, total, the DSL and our phone service. AFAIK there are no usage caps and they don't care that I have my router set up to give free wireless to anybody who wants it.
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No, not period. She doesn't want or need to use new technology. She wants to use the same technology she's been using for the past two years. The machine was perfectly capable of doing anything she needed. Sure, it may not have been blazingly fast, but she didn't care and had better things to spend $500 on. She didn't upgrade because she wanted to play 3D games, a "better internet experience" or because she was dissatisfied with the computer's speed. She upgraded because BellSouth's software made a blanket assumption that any machine slower than, say, 300 MHz ain't fast enough.
The crux of my argument is that the machine far exceeded all system requirements when we first signed up for 1 Mbit DSL back in 2002. All they required then was any Pentium or PowerPC and 32 MB of RAM. Her DSL hasn't changed--it's still the same ol' 1Mbit service!
The only thing it wasn't able to do (for her, mind you) was run the BellSouth software and meet its arbitrary hardware requirements. A PII-class machine is more than sufficient for casual web browsing and word processing.
Get off your high horse.
My mom was using a 1998-vintage Quantex (remember them?) PII/266 with 128 MB of RAM quite happily until last month when her DSL modem died. BellSouth sent out a new modem, but the software accompanying it decided that her computer was too slow. After a couple weeks of back and forth with them we just gave up. (I'm a Mac guy and 1000 miles away, so I couldn't help her with XP that much over the phone.)
;)
So I started shopping and found some pretty good deals on Dell's refurb site. I ended up getting her a 2.6 GHz machine with 512 MB of RAM, 40 GB HDD and a 48x CD-RW for $490 shipped. Yeah, it's a Celeron with integrated graphics...but it doesn't matter. She just surfs the web, prints out house plans and stuff and plays solitaire. The 266 MHz machine was more than capable of doing all of this, but the "industry" forced her to upgrade.
I really wanted to get her a Mac so she wouldn't have to deal with viruses and spyware, but couldn't justify spending twice as much for an eMac. I wish Apple made a cheap "pizza box" G4/G5 machine for people who already have decent monitors. (Try telling a mom that she should get rid of a perfectly good 17" monitor....)
Indeed. When I moved out of my college house, I left my Huffy there in case my old roommates wanted to use it (since I'd bought a DiamondBack).
The other day I got an email from them saying that they'd put the bike down in the garage (the door stays open all the time) and it had been stolen shortly thereafter. Here's what's funny. Apparently the thief had a conscience or was just looking to trade up, 'cause in its place was a ragged-out ghetto cruiser.
We did have a few other interesting things get stolen, including our garden hose and a minifridge (these were outside). But the weirdest thing happened over one Christmas break. Someone broke in and stole the few bottles of liquor we had in the kitchen, but didn't touch any of our TV's (including a 32-incher), DVD player, a Harman/Kardon surround sound system, my PowerMac G4, a PlayStation 2 or anything else expensive.
But for some reason they decided to take my roommate's change jar (had $10 or so in it, tops)....
Good ol' Apple!
Yeah. It has Emilio Estevez fighting a gang of possessed semi trucks. 'Nuff said. By far the worst movie ever.
Here's the scoop.
Here's a trailer (hopefully).
I'm not arguing with you...just a little friendly debate. :)
:)
While the initial purchase price of a Mac is higher, they stay useful a lot longer than the average PC. My G4's four years old and is still plenty fast running current programs like InDesign CS and the latest release of OS X. I doubt you want to try and run XP on a four year old PC.
There are plenty of used G4's on eBay. Good dualies like mine sell for about $500. The only thing you'd probably need would be a new video card, since the Rage 128 Pro that came in them sucks and doesn't support Quartz Extreme. I got a Mac Radeon for $20 on eBay.
And if you know anybody affiliated with a school/college/university, you can get a base dual 1.8 G5 for $1799. That's cheap by Mac standards...my dual 450 was $2200 when it was new back in 7/00.
HTH.
Actually, it does. Those fat IDE cables strung all over the place do a lot to impede airflow. And if you thought the G4 was neat inside, take a look at the G5.
Also, it's much easier to work on a computer when you're not having to constantly move cables, wires and brackets out of the way.
I've been a Mac user for years and currently use an old dual-processor 450 MHz G4. I realized that Macs are generally better designed inside, but didn't realize that current PCs were this cobbled-together. Compare these two shots:
Dell XPS
PowerMac G4
I have a Sony DVP-NC650V 5-disc DVD/SACD/Video CD player. It cost $199 a year ago. The reason I bought it is because my receiver, an old Harman/Kardon, doesn't have a built-in Dolby Digital or DTS decoder, but does have analog 5.1 channel inputs. This Sony is one of the few players I could find that had 5.1 analog outputs.
I haven't read much about it since, but it is my understanding that SACD players (don't know about DVD-A) do not output multichannel sound via the optical or coaxial connections. You must use three two-channel RCA cables to connect it to the receiver. (Front left, front right, center, surround left, surround right, and subwoofer)
I haven't bought any SACD's yet, but it came with sampler disc--and as the other posters have said, it's awesome. There really is a noticeable difference. The live recordings really sound like you're at a concert.
1984.
FWIW, EDU/student pricing on the base dual 1.8 is $1799.
On OS X, click-and-hold is roughly analagous to right-clicking in many applications. For example, in Mozilla, if you click and hold the left mouse button, a contextual menu appears after a short delay. Likewise, doing the same to an icon in the Dock results in a similar menu, which can vary depending on the particular app.
This functionality is probably due to the fact that Apple only includes a one-button mouse with their systems. Another way to get around this limitation is to CTRL-click. This causes a regular click to become a right-click.
I finally just bit the bullet and bought a Logitech scroller. (It works fine without drivers, BTW.)
The Canon works fine on my Mac. /ducks
It's kind of sad that Lexmark's products have gone into the toilet lately, because their old products were rock-solid. My mom had a 2030 inkjet for a long time and it was great. My 5-year-old laser printer is a Lexmark E310. It's just a compact, 600dpi, 8ppm printer. But the cool part is that it has its own 66 MHz processor, PostScript emulation and some RAM expansion slots (I threw an old 32MB SIMM in there--prints anything now!).
Lexmark has drivers for just about every OS on their site:
Every flavor of Windows back to 3.1 (!)
Every Mac OS from 8.6 onward
AIX
Compaq, DEC & HP-UX
OS/2 2, 3 & Warp
Red Hat 7.2, 7.3 & 9
Assorted SCO stuff
Solaris 7, 8, & 9
Various flavors of Linux
Dell doesn't design its own printers! They're simply run-of-the-mill Lexmark units with a Dell logo. But here's the shady part. The Dell printers are modified so that only the special Dell cartridges fit. The Lexmark cartridges had the same pin configuration, but the Dell cartridge holders are shaped a bit differently. If the cheaper Lexmark (or generic) cart is modified a little bit, they work just fine.
I have a laser printer--but Canon seems to be the best deal in inkjets right now. Black carts for most of their printers are only like $7.
We haven't actually done any reference or control scans. This scanner, however, is a beast. It's built like a tank--with the ADF it weighs about 70 pounds. It automatically focuses and adjusts the optics before each scan job. We haven't experienced any image degradation yet.
We're saving all the images as TIFF files with LZW compression (lossless). The 12" x 18" pages at 300 dpi are around 40-50MB. We scan the yearbook pages (9x12) at 200 dpi grayscale and they are around 2MB per page.
HTH.
We've undertaken a pretty large archiving job at my university. We're scanning every page of every newspaper we've ever printed (started in 1927) up to the time we have digital archives starting around 1993 or so. We're also scanning about 80 300 page yearbooks. Hopefully this can offer you some help or suggestions.
We have a dual-processor G4 and an Epson 1640XL large-format FireWire scanner with the optional auto document feeder. It's probably a bit out of your budget ($2899 + ~$1200 for the ADF) but it's awesome. It can scan at up to 1600dpi and the ADF can automatically duplex and scan both sides of the page. We're using OmniPage Pro X for OCR software.
Right now we're more concerned with scanning the documents and getting them online, so we haven't started OCR'ing everything yet. But the ADF is awesome. It can scan both sides of all 300+ pages of a yearbook automatically in about 2 1/2 hours.
The newspapers are a bit different. They're getting a bit fragile in their old age so we have to manually scan them. We scan them at 300dpi in full color, so the 12x18 pages are around 50MB per page. But the scanner takes less than a minute per page. It's impressive.
We use Photoshop's web gallery feature to generate the image galleries. Pretty simple really. Let me know if you have any questions.
AFAIK, my university out in BFE isn't connected to Internet2 yet...but our internet speeds are still pretty impressive.
;)
I'm definitely going to miss the connection I have in my office after I graduate in a few days. My G4 is connected via 100Mbps Ethernet to a switch connected directly to the campus fiber-optic backbone. Most sites can't keep up with it...I have about a 17Mbit connection on my desktop, verified by the speed testers on DSLReports.
The 2.5Mbit (~300KBps) Frontiernet DSL I have at home seems kinda pokey in comparison...
We tried using Orb drives here at my university for student lab work (graphic arts & multimedia=large files). Sure, the capacity was great, speed was decent and disks were relatively cheap for all the space they provided.
But after about a year all the drives started failing left and right. Brought back memories of the Click of Death from a few years ago.
I just used the monitor's controls to resize the image to have an approximate 1-inch black border all the way around. The display is now effectively 11 inches wide...and when set at 1792x1344...gives an on-screen resolution of 163 dpi.
Man...it looks fantastic! The high-res OS X dock icons and all images > 2 megapixels look amazing.
If your monitor'll do it, try downloading some pix from a high-end camera like a Canon 10D from a site like www.dpreview.com. It'll blow you away.
My 17" Sony FD Trinitron will display 1792x1344 @ 60 Hz. Aside from a little flicker, ::grin:: the images from high-end digicams look outstanding. It works out to about 134dpi--almost twice that of a traditional display--and, interestingly, just about enough to get decent printed output in something like a newspaper.
It also supports 1920x1080 (same as the best HDTV) but won't let me smush down the screen image enough to correct the aspect ratio.
I know it's not even remotely comparable, but check out these numbers....kinda interesting.
;)
The standard dual 2 GHz XServe costs $3999 and comes with 1 GB of RAM and 80 GB of disk space. So, if you take a 42U rack and fill it up with dual 2-GHz XServes...
You'll be spending $168,000.
That's... 84 processors, 42GB of RAM and 3.36 TB of disk space...seems to compare quite favorably to the other boxen.
My mom is using the same monitor she's had since 1990. It's branded "Seiko Instruments" but has a Trinitron tube.
First it was attached to a Dell 386/25, then a no-brand 60 Mhz Pentium, and now a 266 MHz PII.
It works fine at 800x600, and will actually do 1024x768 (painfully interlaced, tho).
Surprisingly enough, we have GREAT (~3Mbit) DSL from Frontier out here in the sticks (Statesboro, Georgia).
We pay them $79 a month, total, the DSL and our phone service. AFAIK there are no usage caps and they don't care that I have my router set up to give free wireless to anybody who wants it.
Eh. Totally missed that...strange.
...at the Apple Store
Scroll down and click on "Special Deals" on the left side of the page.
10GB -> $229.00 (no dock)
15GB -> $279.00
30GB -> $349.00