Are modern G4 towers quieter and/or cooler than comparable x86 workstations?
I have a G4/833 Tower, as well as a Pentium IV 1.7 Ghz. The 1.7 is in a steel ATX supertower with a processor fan, two 4" smart fans, and a fan on the video card. It's noisy.
The G4 has an excellent enclosure for heat dissipation, and uses a processor heatsink and one 3" case fan. It produces the same percieved noise levels as the whitenoise from my external computer speakers when I crank them all the way up.
Is it wiser to spend money on memory or megahertz?
It really depends on your application. I develop on my Mac, and I do some Photoshop work, as well. Memory is definitely an issue for me, and I have 512MB of memory. I use PC-133 SDRAM, which is thankfully very inexpensive. You have four slots to work with, and I'd recommend configuring at least 384 MB of RAM for mid-user applications. If you want to be a power-user, get a half-gig or more. And buy all of the processor power that you can afford. You won't be sorry.
Is it best to buy everything directly from Apple, or just a minimum to be fleshed out with cheaper, after-market add-ons?
I like using the Apple Store for the "build-to-order" config options, just because it's handy. For things like RAM, unless you're taking advantage of some sort of promotional deal, get the RAM from a third party. Almost all RAM is lifetime-guaranteed, anyway. I really like getting into the G4 case. You just pull the latch, open the hood, and look around.
What's the best video option for dual-head on Jaguar?
Jaguar's not out yet, but I don't think it's gonna cause me to change my config. I use the GeForce 4 card that came with it along with a Radeon 8500 for my dual-head setup. It's actually probably a little bit of overkill, but everything works great.
Is the SCSI performance gain great enough to be worth the investment over IDE?"
Not for my use, but a good friend of mine does a ton of video editing, and he swears by his SCSI-3 RAID. It's certainly noticeably faster, but it's also a lot of $$. I love the speed of my Mac, and I also like to avoid spending lots of $$ for frills. I'd say that if you're thinking of going SCSI-1, don't waste your time. Only SCSI-2 or -3 are going to make a noticeable difference over Ultra-ATA, IMHO.
Perhaps you should check out GIMP, a really great image manipulation utility. It has some excellent features. Here's what a copy of GIMP will cost you:
Time: 0 Money: $0, also 0 in Yen, EU's, or Deutschmarcs. Opinion: $0.02, which you may not have, since you already spent it;)
I think your argument is a little short-sighted. Other products exist that are not as time-and-labor intensive to create, or they are steeped in an open-sourced development cycle, and the programmers generously donate their time and code to the community. I have seen several software lifecycles from many different companies, and I can tell you that many thousands of person-hours go into one release candidate of a feature-rich application like Photoshop, not to mention updates, tech support, advertising, coffee, and beer.
The current company that I work for ships a modular software application which cost us millions of dollars to develop. Guess what! We don't like giving it away. In fact, our "lite" version sells for $4500 SRP.
Please mod me down if you think I'm ranting, but I'm one developer that doesn't think that all software company executives are trying to rape customers' wallets for personal profit. Some are just trying to be good economists in a capitalistic enterprise. Supply and demand does seem to work, after all.
There are more chickens in Northwest Arkansas than there are people that live east of the Mississippi River. I guess Fayetteville would become the new Silicon Valley--of course, we'd have to call it Chicken Hill, or Cluck Central, or something. Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters of the World's Largest Corporation, is very near Fayetteville, so if the 'Chicken Chips' really take off, the one-two combo of Wal-Mart and Chicken Transistors could revolutionize the Arkansas economy.
On a totally unrelated note, the hairiest toes I ever saw on a woman was in Arkansas. True story.
It allows you to hook your iPod up to your PC's FireWire card and use it like a hard drive. You just "Drag And Drop"(TM) the.mp3 files that you want to use, and the iPod's on-board software takes care of playback.
I haven't figured out a way to order the songs, though. With a Mac running iTunes, you just change the way the songs are sorted, and the changes are saved on the iPod. Or, you could create new playlists for the iPod and customize the playback order. Or, you could just turn the shuffle feature on the iPod if you don't have a preference. Regardless, I got a copy of XPlay, and I was mostly pleased with it. It lets me take files from home to the office and vice-versa, so it's manageable for what I need. I prefer using iTunes to "Hot-Sync"(TM) my iPod because of the extra features, but XPlay is certainly manageable.
We've already had a discussion thread about XPlay before, so you may find some helpful info there.
As far as the iPod is concerned, I couldn't be more pleased. I have the 10gig version, and it stores all 90+ of my CD's. I've spent weeks sorting through songs and getting things organized. It's a lot of fun, and the interface is super-intuitive. If you're interested in getting the iPod, note that the 10gig version ships with the latest version of iPod software, where the 5 gig does not. You can download a free update from Apple, but I'm not entirely sure how a PC user without Mac access would install the update. I'm sure your local Apple dealer would accommodate you if you were nice to them, especially if you lived close to an Apple Store.
Actually, the Loch Ness Monster is the alien tourist! There is a large group of "Nessies" who visit Scotland, because they love the fog, and they're partial to lochs and fjords. Plus, they really like the sound of bagpipes.
If you just turn your brain off for a minute and try to think, it really makes sense.
I think that Apple is demonstrating that they have learned from previous mistakes. After years of keeping with their notorious tradition of the "Not Made In Cupertino" syndrome, they have the good sense to buy what they can't produce, and not just competition, but competitors with quality products. It wasn't that long ago that Apple bought Casady & Greene, and they got themselves an excellent mp3 utility in what used to be SoundJam. Then, as Apple's Digital Hub strategy emerged, it was shown that SoundJam, newly repackaged as iTunes, was at the forefront of the digital showcase. Apple already has iMovie, and I have no doubt that they have a vested corporate interest in continually upgrading their "Digital Hub".
Perhaps some would argue that this is not necessarily "News for Nerds," but it's certainly stuff that matters.
When one thinks of the ways that the world has changed since World War II, how many of the changes that occurred came about through reasons of war and political machinery, it is staggering to realize that we really are in a "new world," where the new military-industrial complex is cloaked by bureaucracy and the old, corrupt political machines are replaced by the new, corrupt rhetoricians and wordsmiths. If Politicians, Priests, and Poets are the only real leaders, then the paradigm that separates them has changed.
Remembering Kafka's writings from college was really disturbing and revealing--nearly illuminating. Franz Kafka was one of the few brave souls of his period to declare through his writings that humankind had lost its rightful place in the world, and as a result, humans would become increasingly isolated, alienated, and cynical. I believe that the world is increasingly cynical and apathetic, and in many ways, our own private and public attitudes feed the modern conspiracy theorists and doomsayers. I don't think that the world is "All Doom and Gloom," but I shudder to think of being conquered by ideas rather than by guns. That's real bondage.
I will get way out on the proverbial limb and say that any Unified Theory of Linux will turn to vapor within a year.
I'd like to hear some discussion about this point; it seems to me that while us nerds like the Many Flavors Of *NIX, the Suits want One Thing to manage, which from a business standpoint seems to make a lot of sense.
So, feel free to disagree, or mod me down, or whatever.:P
'delivers the stability of UNIX with the ease of Windows and the ability to run most Microsoft programs.'
After reading that phrase, I ran some of the keywords through Google. The results verified that it wasn't deja vu, after all.
It makes me wonder whose attorneys objected most strongly, and I'm laughing like crazy at how ballsy these guys are at ripping off (or on?) established intellectual property.
Here is a site that explains a little more about 6-D Haptics. Cool stuff.
Haptics could offer the magical possibility of changing the average gamer from a large cholesterol repository into a lean mass of muscle. Well, maybe not, but it's a neat idea.
If Triangle Man and Your Racist Friend had a fight, would Triangle win?
Or, can you build a little Birdhouse In Your Soul with Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love?
And shouldn't this film be about a Road Movie To Berlin?
I feel like I've learned a lot from TMBG: Pet Rocks are cool, accordian music can be really groovy, and you can be a total nerd and still be a rockin' musician.
On a serious note, does anyone know what the backmasking is in the first:10 of Hearing Aid?
Think of the injuries that could be avoided by just have the AI figure out how the score will turn out. No need to play the game; just sit back and enjoy the simulation.
Isn't the sustaining of injuries one of the cases that player agents make for multi-bizillion dollar salaries?
As several have mentioned, there are some precedent laws dealing with libel over the internet. Pretty disgruntling. I wonder why this escaped the mainstream radar? Surely the ACLU or Oprah would have something to say about it.
DISCLAIMER: I made no intentionally misleading or disparaging comments in this internet post about Oprah Winfrey, the ACLU, or the Texas Cattlemen's Association.
Something really stinks about this story, and it's not the fish.
I suspect some sort of coercion on the part of the claimant (Novak) or his representatives (Attorneys) to get the defendants to settle on such a fluke, or else there really was some sort of conspiracy against the fish man.
I believe that the merits of this case are a red herring.:P
That reminds me of a joke:
Q: What's the difference between Novak's attorney and a catfish?
A: One is a bottom-dwelling scum-sucker, and one's a fish.
FireWire is already on the ball.
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Other than the touted 600Mb data rate versus 400Mb for FireWire, I don't see any real advantages to this new standard. FireWire (aka IEEE 1394 is already planned for use in internal devices, and it looks like a competition footrace may emerge between SATA and FireWire.
Because of Apple's noted efforts in founding the FireWire project, It will be interesting to see what side Microsoft will support the strongest.
Slashdot Mirror
Are modern G4 towers quieter and/or cooler than comparable x86 workstations?
I have a G4/833 Tower, as well as a Pentium IV 1.7 Ghz. The 1.7 is in a steel ATX supertower with a processor fan, two 4" smart fans, and a fan on the video card. It's noisy.
The G4 has an excellent enclosure for heat dissipation, and uses a processor heatsink and one 3" case fan. It produces the same percieved noise levels as the whitenoise from my external computer speakers when I crank them all the way up.
Is it wiser to spend money on memory or megahertz?
It really depends on your application. I develop on my Mac, and I do some Photoshop work, as well. Memory is definitely an issue for me, and I have 512MB of memory. I use PC-133 SDRAM, which is thankfully very inexpensive. You have four slots to work with, and I'd recommend configuring at least 384 MB of RAM for mid-user applications. If you want to be a power-user, get a half-gig or more. And buy all of the processor power that you can afford. You won't be sorry.
Is it best to buy everything directly from Apple, or just a minimum to be fleshed out with cheaper, after-market add-ons?
I like using the Apple Store for the "build-to-order" config options, just because it's handy. For things like RAM, unless you're taking advantage of some sort of promotional deal, get the RAM from a third party. Almost all RAM is lifetime-guaranteed, anyway. I really like getting into the G4 case. You just pull the latch, open the hood, and look around.
What's the best video option for dual-head on Jaguar?
Jaguar's not out yet, but I don't think it's gonna cause me to change my config. I use the GeForce 4 card that came with it along with a Radeon 8500 for my dual-head setup. It's actually probably a little bit of overkill, but everything works great.
Is the SCSI performance gain great enough to be worth the investment over IDE?"
Not for my use, but a good friend of mine does a ton of video editing, and he swears by his SCSI-3 RAID. It's certainly noticeably faster, but it's also a lot of $$. I love the speed of my Mac, and I also like to avoid spending lots of $$ for frills. I'd say that if you're thinking of going SCSI-1, don't waste your time. Only SCSI-2 or -3 are going to make a noticeable difference over Ultra-ATA, IMHO.
This is NOT worth...
;)
Perhaps you should check out GIMP, a really great image manipulation utility. It has some excellent features. Here's what a copy of GIMP will cost you:
Time: 0
Money: $0, also 0 in Yen, EU's, or Deutschmarcs.
Opinion: $0.02, which you may not have, since you already spent it
I think your argument is a little short-sighted. Other products exist that are not as time-and-labor intensive to create, or they are steeped in an open-sourced development cycle, and the programmers generously donate their time and code to the community. I have seen several software lifecycles from many different companies, and I can tell you that many thousands of person-hours go into one release candidate of a feature-rich application like Photoshop, not to mention updates, tech support, advertising, coffee, and beer.
The current company that I work for ships a modular software application which cost us millions of dollars to develop. Guess what! We don't like giving it away. In fact, our "lite" version sells for $4500 SRP.
Please mod me down if you think I'm ranting, but I'm one developer that doesn't think that all software company executives are trying to rape customers' wallets for personal profit. Some are just trying to be good economists in a capitalistic enterprise. Supply and demand does seem to work, after all.
There are more chickens in Northwest Arkansas than there are people that live east of the Mississippi River. I guess Fayetteville would become the new Silicon Valley--of course, we'd have to call it Chicken Hill, or Cluck Central, or something. Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters of the World's Largest Corporation, is very near Fayetteville, so if the 'Chicken Chips' really take off, the one-two combo of Wal-Mart and Chicken Transistors could revolutionize the Arkansas economy.
On a totally unrelated note, the hairiest toes I ever saw on a woman was in Arkansas. True story.
It allows you to hook your iPod up to your PC's FireWire card and use it like a hard drive. You just "Drag And Drop"(TM) the .mp3 files that you want to use, and the iPod's on-board software takes care of playback.
I haven't figured out a way to order the songs, though. With a Mac running iTunes, you just change the way the songs are sorted, and the changes are saved on the iPod. Or, you could create new playlists for the iPod and customize the playback order. Or, you could just turn the shuffle feature on the iPod if you don't have a preference. Regardless, I got a copy of XPlay, and I was mostly pleased with it. It lets me take files from home to the office and vice-versa, so it's manageable for what I need. I prefer using iTunes to "Hot-Sync"(TM) my iPod because of the extra features, but XPlay is certainly manageable.
We've already had a discussion thread about XPlay before, so you may find some helpful info there.
As far as the iPod is concerned, I couldn't be more pleased. I have the 10gig version, and it stores all 90+ of my CD's. I've spent weeks sorting through songs and getting things organized. It's a lot of fun, and the interface is super-intuitive. If you're interested in getting the iPod, note that the 10gig version ships with the latest version of iPod software, where the 5 gig does not. You can download a free update from Apple, but I'm not entirely sure how a PC user without Mac access would install the update. I'm sure your local Apple dealer would accommodate you if you were nice to them, especially if you lived close to an Apple Store.
Actually, the Loch Ness Monster is the alien tourist! There is a large group of "Nessies" who visit Scotland, because they love the fog, and they're partial to lochs and fjords. Plus, they really like the sound of bagpipes.
If you just turn your brain off for a minute and try to think, it really makes sense.
I think that Apple is demonstrating that they have learned from previous mistakes. After years of keeping with their notorious tradition of the "Not Made In Cupertino" syndrome, they have the good sense to buy what they can't produce, and not just competition, but competitors with quality products. It wasn't that long ago that Apple bought Casady & Greene, and they got themselves an excellent mp3 utility in what used to be SoundJam. Then, as Apple's Digital Hub strategy emerged, it was shown that SoundJam, newly repackaged as iTunes, was at the forefront of the digital showcase. Apple already has iMovie, and I have no doubt that they have a vested corporate interest in continually upgrading their "Digital Hub".
Perhaps some would argue that this is not necessarily "News for Nerds," but it's certainly stuff that matters.
When one thinks of the ways that the world has changed since World War II, how many of the changes that occurred came about through reasons of war and political machinery, it is staggering to realize that we really are in a "new world," where the new military-industrial complex is cloaked by bureaucracy and the old, corrupt political machines are replaced by the new, corrupt rhetoricians and wordsmiths. If Politicians, Priests, and Poets are the only real leaders, then the paradigm that separates them has changed.
Remembering Kafka's writings from college was really disturbing and revealing--nearly illuminating. Franz Kafka was one of the few brave souls of his period to declare through his writings that humankind had lost its rightful place in the world, and as a result, humans would become increasingly isolated, alienated, and cynical. I believe that the world is increasingly cynical and apathetic, and in many ways, our own private and public attitudes feed the modern conspiracy theorists and doomsayers. I don't think that the world is "All Doom and Gloom," but I shudder to think of being conquered by ideas rather than by guns. That's real bondage.
I will get way out on the proverbial limb and say that any Unified Theory of Linux will turn to vapor within a year.
:P
I'd like to hear some discussion about this point; it seems to me that while us nerds like the Many Flavors Of *NIX, the Suits want One Thing to manage, which from a business standpoint seems to make a lot of sense.
So, feel free to disagree, or mod me down, or whatever.
'delivers the stability of UNIX with the ease of Windows and the ability to run most Microsoft programs.'
After reading that phrase, I ran some of the keywords through Google. The results verified that it wasn't deja vu, after all.
It makes me wonder whose attorneys objected most strongly, and I'm laughing like crazy at how ballsy these guys are at ripping off (or on?) established intellectual property.
Here is a site that explains a little more about 6-D Haptics. Cool stuff.
Haptics could offer the magical possibility of changing the average gamer from a large cholesterol repository into a lean mass of muscle. Well, maybe not, but it's a neat idea.
If Triangle Man and Your Racist Friend had a fight, would Triangle win?
:10 of Hearing Aid?
Or, can you build a little Birdhouse In Your Soul with Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love?
And shouldn't this film be about a Road Movie To Berlin?
I feel like I've learned a lot from TMBG: Pet Rocks are cool, accordian music can be really groovy, and you can be a total nerd and still be a rockin' musician.
On a serious note, does anyone know what the backmasking is in the first
Think of the injuries that could be avoided by just have the AI figure out how the score will turn out. No need to play the game; just sit back and enjoy the simulation.
Isn't the sustaining of injuries one of the cases that player agents make for multi-bizillion dollar salaries?
all I'm saying is the Earth was not made in a day.
Good point. The Earth was made in six days, and on the seventh day, He rested.
As several have mentioned, there are some precedent laws dealing with libel over the internet. Pretty disgruntling. I wonder why this escaped the mainstream radar? Surely the ACLU or Oprah would have something to say about it.
DISCLAIMER: I made no intentionally misleading or disparaging comments in this internet post about Oprah Winfrey, the ACLU, or the Texas Cattlemen's Association.
And neither did Slashdot.
Something really stinks about this story, and it's not the fish. I suspect some sort of coercion on the part of the claimant (Novak) or his representatives (Attorneys) to get the defendants to settle on such a fluke, or else there really was some sort of conspiracy against the fish man. I believe that the merits of this case are a red herring. :P
That reminds me of a joke:
Q: What's the difference between Novak's attorney and a catfish?
A: One is a bottom-dwelling scum-sucker, and one's a fish.
Other than the touted 600Mb data rate versus 400Mb for FireWire, I don't see any real advantages to this new standard. FireWire (aka IEEE 1394 is already planned for use in internal devices, and it looks like a competition footrace may emerge between SATA and FireWire. Because of Apple's noted efforts in founding the FireWire project, It will be interesting to see what side Microsoft will support the strongest.