Re:It just worked
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You can't go wrong hooking up an iMac (unless you don't know to connect the mouse to the keyboard).
I know that person; he keeps phoning me for advice. Does anyone know of a service that will home deliver a clue?
Re:It's as if a thousands hands screamed out in pa
on
iMac Turns 10
·
· Score: 2, Informative
However real upgrades were right out.
Unless you count the upgrade cards from Powerlogix and Sonnet, which were just about the only way to upgrade any Macintosh's CPU. The iMac wasn't exactly a new direction for Apple in this regard.
Plus accessing anything in the original iMAC with its obtrusive CRT monitor was a nightmare.
Loosening eight screws, removing two plastic covers, and sliding out a tray isn't what I'd call a nightmare, I'd call it "two minutes with a long shanked number 1 Phillips screwdriver and a prying tool", myself. The secret is turning it upside down.
The iMac might last you 2-3 years max!
I gave a 2001 indigo model to a friend about two years ago, and since he rarely does anything more demanding than playing music, email and web browsing it suits him perfectly. Another friend's 2000 iMac just died of capacitor failure, but until then it still did everything he needed from it. And I know plenty of other people with CRT iMacs, so rather than 2-3 years, I'm seeing people getting 6-10 years out of them (despite the dodgy capacitors), while buying nothing more than RAM. Now perhaps I've got an eccentric world view, but it seems to me that a computer that does it's job as a single unit for that long is far less wasteful than the typical "grandpa's axe" beige box.
And that's one reason the iMac was a success: it was designed for people who wouldn't upgrade their computers component-by-component anyway, it was an appliance. Put bread in, set to medium brown, toast pops out, easy. Again, that isn't exactly a new direction for Apple, and their profitability over recent years suggests they might actually have a clue about who they're selling computers to.
Apparently [left caret]30% is an html tag, but not one that gets picked up in the preview. Brilliant.
That should have read:
In my house is an Elgato EyeTV connected to a 2003 eMac via FireWire (which my 74 year old father set up two weeks after having a stent inserted in his carotid artery and with less than 30% blood flow to his brain). So far from being cool, it's a task for a brain-damaged septuagenarian.
mount your HDD through a loop over a coat-hanger....and so on.
In my house is an Elgato EyeTV connected to a 2003 eMac via FireWire (which my 74 year old father set up two weeks after having a stent inserted in his carotid artery and with mount your HDD through a loop over a coat-hanger.
Um...no, that's just reckless, sub-Meccano grade stuff. Get back to me when you've securely shoehorned six HDDs into a computer that only has four drive bays, designed and built a bypass for the PSU that lets it run on a battery bank without an inverter or switch to mains automatically when available, mounted the whole thing in a rack and installed it in an outside broadcast van, which I did a few years ago with a G4 tower.
...but I've seen plenty of tasks where naive assumptions can and will stop things from working.
Emphasis mine: you can't stop something from working unless it worked to begin with. What you're talking about here is "it just works until I screw around with it before R-ing TFM"; this is a wetware issue that no OS can fix.
But I am intrigued to hear what kind of tasks you refer to.
Unless a Mac intended to run Supercollider and Quarks or MySQL (for instance) ceases to be a Mac in your definition...
Are they part of the operating system? No. Are they hardware? No. Are they relevant one way or another? Not in the slightest, because I'm talking about installing a basic operating system; that is, actually getting a computer up and running in the first place. If you're jumping through hoops to get to that stage (as I did with the EeePC), it is not Macintosh-like, because you don't have to do that to get a Macintosh up and running. That's the point; remember "Computers for the rest of us"?
I think you'd be on safer ground simply arguing that "Macness" requires both OSX and Apple-approved hardware.
That's exactly what I said! I'll rephrase it, so it's perfectly clear: if you install OS X on anything but an Apple, whether or not it will work (as in OS booting normally, all hardware functioning correctly) is pretty much dumb luck, so in terms of the amount of inconvenience involved it might as well be Windows with an Aqua interface.
*Example: a video editor who manually saved a new project file every ten minutes, and maxed out the hard drive because each project file took up ~240MB. Huge project.
"Just works" is not something which is associated with a Mac in today's world.
It isn't? I must remember to explain that to the dozens of people I've helped switch from Windows in the last three years, because they all seem to have that impression.
Then again, they're only concentrating on the computer in front of them, not raising specious arguments about unrelated appliances.
With all the iphone its more "just works the way we want it too"
Oddly, the fact that I don't own an iPhone has not affected the reliability or usability of my Macintoshes one iota, so what one has to do with the other (apart from the obvious fact that they're made by the same company) eludes me. And since I'm not in the market for an expensive tinker-toy, I don't really care.
You're certainly getting more of the Mac experience than a PC one.
Having installed OS X on an EeePC, I'd say all you're getting is an Aqua interface for a PC experience. When it's completely painless and everything "just works" I might agree with you.
Roger Corman is still alive, and record executives are as close to brain eating zombies as you can get, so I think he'd be interested.
BTW: Recording Industry Association of America != Motion Picture Association of America. Paramount and New Line aren't RIAA members, and somehow I've got the impression that they wouldn't let principles stand in the way of profit.
Playing classical music with long silences over a coat hanger, however, may provide audibly different results than real cabling.
Highly unlikely. A piece of wire (or short length of solid metal, which is just a very thick and rigid wire and better known by EEs as a "bus bar") is the most linear component there is. It doesn't introduce non-linear distortion the way an overdriven or underbiased amplifier does.
Poor quality cables introduce frequency-dependent or "group" delays, which interfere with stereo imaging and in extreme cases form an audible band-pass filter. Electronic and distorted pop music has high frequency content and transients that an orchestra simply can't match, so those types of music show up cable deficiencies much more readily. These deficiencies are most often caused by cable capacitance and inductance (which have a far greater influence than the skin effect), but they're still linear, so a bad cable might make the sound muffled but it isn't going to make Andres Segovia sound like Metallica. It's not that kind of distortion.
Silences (and dynamic range in general) are irrelevant; silence doesn't distort regardless of what it's played through because it is, by definition, no signal. Amplifiers add noise, true, but cables don't amplify; the noise and distortion component from a cable is purely thermal and shot noise* (which can induce significant non-linearities in signals where each electron counts, but for the purposes of a power amplifier that can be safely disregarded).
And FWIW, I think Monster cables are a complete rip-off. 240V, 10A stranded mains flex has far lower capacitance and inductance, but slightly higher resistance (which is swamped by the crossover anyway), and costs a hell of a lot less.
*I expect someone to mention microdiodes in conductors; to any such jackass, I'd point out that if microdiodes exist in cables (and they've never actually been measured, despite decades of research), they would also exist in the low level stages where the non-linearities would be proportionally greater and amplified along with the signal. The idea that a signal chain from microphone to speaker can have a totally clean gain of up to 140dB, yet audible distortion can be added by an unmesurable property of a component with no gain at the last stage is pure quackery, and that's being kind.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't go wrong hooking up an iMac (unless you don't know to connect the mouse to the keyboard).
I know that person; he keeps phoning me for advice. Does anyone know of a service that will home deliver a clue?
However real upgrades were right out.
Unless you count the upgrade cards from Powerlogix and Sonnet, which were just about the only way to upgrade any Macintosh's CPU. The iMac wasn't exactly a new direction for Apple in this regard.
Plus accessing anything in the original iMAC with its obtrusive CRT monitor was a nightmare.
Loosening eight screws, removing two plastic covers, and sliding out a tray isn't what I'd call a nightmare, I'd call it "two minutes with a long shanked number 1 Phillips screwdriver and a prying tool", myself. The secret is turning it upside down.
The iMac might last you 2-3 years max!
I gave a 2001 indigo model to a friend about two years ago, and since he rarely does anything more demanding than playing music, email and web browsing it suits him perfectly. Another friend's 2000 iMac just died of capacitor failure, but until then it still did everything he needed from it. And I know plenty of other people with CRT iMacs, so rather than 2-3 years, I'm seeing people getting 6-10 years out of them (despite the dodgy capacitors), while buying nothing more than RAM. Now perhaps I've got an eccentric world view, but it seems to me that a computer that does it's job as a single unit for that long is far less wasteful than the typical "grandpa's axe" beige box.
And that's one reason the iMac was a success: it was designed for people who wouldn't upgrade their computers component-by-component anyway, it was an appliance. Put bread in, set to medium brown, toast pops out, easy. Again, that isn't exactly a new direction for Apple, and their profitability over recent years suggests they might actually have a clue about who they're selling computers to.
Not as old as the two dead iMacs currently awaiting salvage in my office, I bet.
Why isn't there a "-1, Ewww" mod?
It reminds me of Appleworks. Which is to say it feels like a Mac application, but not a very good one.
(Kidding. A brief fiddle about with it makes me very hopeful.)
You should really get out more often. Have you considered dating?
With a stutter like that? The ladies would laugh.
Apparently [left caret]30% is an html tag, but not one that gets picked up in the preview. Brilliant.
...and so on.
That should have read:
In my house is an Elgato EyeTV connected to a 2003 eMac via FireWire (which my 74 year old father set up two weeks after having a stent inserted in his carotid artery and with less than 30% blood flow to his brain). So far from being cool, it's a task for a brain-damaged septuagenarian.
mount your HDD through a loop over a coat-hanger.
Cool is in the eye of the beholder.
convert a 5 y/o box into a PVR
In my house is an Elgato EyeTV connected to a 2003 eMac via FireWire (which my 74 year old father set up two weeks after having a stent inserted in his carotid artery and with mount your HDD through a loop over a coat-hanger.
Um...no, that's just reckless, sub-Meccano grade stuff. Get back to me when you've securely shoehorned six HDDs into a computer that only has four drive bays, designed and built a bypass for the PSU that lets it run on a battery bank without an inverter or switch to mains automatically when available, mounted the whole thing in a rack and installed it in an outside broadcast van, which I did a few years ago with a G4 tower.
Does it blend WHILE running Linux?
Not for long.
...but I've seen plenty of tasks where naive assumptions can and will stop things from working.
Emphasis mine: you can't stop something from working unless it worked to begin with. What you're talking about here is "it just works until I screw around with it before R-ing TFM"; this is a wetware issue that no OS can fix.
But I am intrigued to hear what kind of tasks you refer to.
Unless a Mac intended to run Supercollider and Quarks or MySQL (for instance) ceases to be a Mac in your definition...
Are they part of the operating system? No. Are they hardware? No. Are they relevant one way or another? Not in the slightest, because I'm talking about installing a basic operating system; that is, actually getting a computer up and running in the first place. If you're jumping through hoops to get to that stage (as I did with the EeePC), it is not Macintosh-like, because you don't have to do that to get a Macintosh up and running. That's the point; remember "Computers for the rest of us"?
I think you'd be on safer ground simply arguing that "Macness" requires both OSX and Apple-approved hardware.
That's exactly what I said! I'll rephrase it, so it's perfectly clear: if you install OS X on anything but an Apple, whether or not it will work (as in OS booting normally, all hardware functioning correctly) is pretty much dumb luck, so in terms of the amount of inconvenience involved it might as well be Windows with an Aqua interface.
*Example: a video editor who manually saved a new project file every ten minutes, and maxed out the hard drive because each project file took up ~240MB. Huge project.
...to get Windows to work...
...Windows...er, where'd that come from?
"Just works" is not something which is associated with a Mac in today's world.
It isn't? I must remember to explain that to the dozens of people I've helped switch from Windows in the last three years, because they all seem to have that impression.
Then again, they're only concentrating on the computer in front of them, not raising specious arguments about unrelated appliances.
With all the iphone its more "just works the way we want it too"
Oddly, the fact that I don't own an iPhone has not affected the reliability or usability of my Macintoshes one iota, so what one has to do with the other (apart from the obvious fact that they're made by the same company) eludes me. And since I'm not in the market for an expensive tinker-toy, I don't really care.
You're certainly getting more of the Mac experience than a PC one.
Having installed OS X on an EeePC, I'd say all you're getting is an Aqua interface for a PC experience. When it's completely painless and everything "just works" I might agree with you.
If I'm not mistaken, his face is a haddock
why would they need to buy a country?
No, they've bought Jimmy Wales; it's a PR move.
Some followers of Yaweh, will tell me that the yummy, healthy, normal sex I has last night is wrong and a sin.
Wheras on Slashdot you'll be told it was imaginary.
I'll just buy a used CD and rip it.
Works fo-fo-fo-fo-fo-fo-fo-fo-fo-fo-for me.
Roger Corman is still alive, and record executives are as close to brain eating zombies as you can get, so I think he'd be interested.
BTW: Recording Industry Association of America != Motion Picture Association of America. Paramount and New Line aren't RIAA members, and somehow I've got the impression that they wouldn't let principles stand in the way of profit.
I'd want to see a movie that was counter RIAA.
Soundtrack available through...oh, wait...
Pretty soon we'll realize that anything a human can discern on the internet a computer can discern.
So eventually computers will be able to surf for pr0n by themselves.
The nerd's lot just keeps getting worse...
Billy Joel...???
There's a thing called "it", which, it is my sad duty to impart, you are not and never will be with.
Playing classical music with long silences over a coat hanger, however, may provide audibly different results than real cabling.
Highly unlikely. A piece of wire (or short length of solid metal, which is just a very thick and rigid wire and better known by EEs as a "bus bar") is the most linear component there is. It doesn't introduce non-linear distortion the way an overdriven or underbiased amplifier does.
Poor quality cables introduce frequency-dependent or "group" delays, which interfere with stereo imaging and in extreme cases form an audible band-pass filter. Electronic and distorted pop music has high frequency content and transients that an orchestra simply can't match, so those types of music show up cable deficiencies much more readily. These deficiencies are most often caused by cable capacitance and inductance (which have a far greater influence than the skin effect), but they're still linear, so a bad cable might make the sound muffled but it isn't going to make Andres Segovia sound like Metallica. It's not that kind of distortion.
Silences (and dynamic range in general) are irrelevant; silence doesn't distort regardless of what it's played through because it is, by definition, no signal. Amplifiers add noise, true, but cables don't amplify; the noise and distortion component from a cable is purely thermal and shot noise* (which can induce significant non-linearities in signals where each electron counts, but for the purposes of a power amplifier that can be safely disregarded).
And FWIW, I think Monster cables are a complete rip-off. 240V, 10A stranded mains flex has far lower capacitance and inductance, but slightly higher resistance (which is swamped by the crossover anyway), and costs a hell of a lot less.
*I expect someone to mention microdiodes in conductors; to any such jackass, I'd point out that if microdiodes exist in cables (and they've never actually been measured, despite decades of research), they would also exist in the low level stages where the non-linearities would be proportionally greater and amplified along with the signal. The idea that a signal chain from microphone to speaker can have a totally clean gain of up to 140dB, yet audible distortion can be added by an unmesurable property of a component with no gain at the last stage is pure quackery, and that's being kind.
What, only Oklahoma?!
Almost anything by Microsoft is lightweight.
I disagree: Microsoft products are built like sumo wrestlers.
The problem is we want sprinters.
See, the highways are like a series of tubes...