By your measure, jail time never helps society with non-violent offenders. It does, however, because it provides a deterrent to others who might consider committing similar crimes in the future. Few people respect the law simply because it is the right thing to do. The threat of jail time for many is all that creates respect for the law.
If you aren't going to back up laws with punishment there is no need to have the laws in the first place.
"You listed some of the best examples yourself: Just because you still have the death penalty, there aren't any less murders being committed in the States than elsewhere."
Sorry, this isn't proof at all. You can't compare murder rates in the US to other countries. Besides, the death penalty is a state-by-state thing.
"Besides, even if it worked, is this theory acceptable?"
Assuming you mean disproportionate sentences, then yes. They are used all the time. How about possession of child pornography?
"By its logic, as I understand it, every criminal would have to be executed, probably with some torture beforehand."
That's absurd. Death penalties only apply, where they are legal at all, to certain particularly heinous crimes. Torture is unconstitutional (in the US) and can't be used regardless. It's a fact, though, that cruel and unusual punishment, in countries where it's practiced, is an effective deterrent. Some countries use the death penalty against homosexuals and that practice is certainly effective in eliminating the population of openly gay citizens.
"Now, lets assume that this would actually work to some extent. Imagine what ridiculously small thing people would get killed for."
The bad application of a good idea is bound to yield bad results. You've proven yourself unqualified to make the laws, that's all.
"Your argument only holds if the filesystem allocates space at the start of the drive and works its way to the end without leaving gaps when it fact it is optimized to do precisely the opposite. Files are dispersed across the whole drive in order to give them room to grow without fragmenting them."
Only if the filesystems designers want the performance to be crappy. Windows certainly doesn't do that and I doubt any other system does either.
"The only way your I/O can be guaranteed to remain within the first X percent of the disk is if you reduce the size of your partition accordingly."
Yes, that's called short-stroking and it is done in certain applications. We aren't talking guarantees here, though, we're talking effective performance.
"MacOS contains optimizations to put certain parts of the OS closer to the beginning of the drive, but these also benefit from higher RPMs, since the rotational latency is reduced."
Sounds like they've figured that out, too.
NTFS absolutely does not lay out its filesystem as you say as that would be moronic. Regardless, I certainly don't have it "backwards".
I don't agree with that. They're both subjective and nearly the same. Any differences between the two measures may well stem from hypocracy as much as anything else. Why would I recommend something to a friend that I thought poorly of? Why would I not recommend it if I thought highly of it?
There is absolutely no doubt that Apple customers think differently about Apple than PC customers think of any of the PC suppliers and that immediately alters the outcome of a customer satisfaction poll. It still tells you what people think but it is in no way an even playing field. If, instead, the poll asked what you suggest, I would claim that the result would be even more stacked.
Apple supporters evangelize vastly more than PC supporters (as you would expect from a minority platform) and they're much more likely to paint a rosy, problem-free experience regardless of whether it's true for them or not. They identify as a "member of the team" and frequently form emotional attachments to their computer that PC users, as a group, do not. PC users view the PC as a device whereas mac users view the mac as a lifestyle choice. There's no way a customer satisfaction poll will ever take that into account.
I have friends who are totally into fashion. They have their favorite designers and are totally blind to the consistent horrible construction quality of the apparel and accessories in spite of the fact that the items they do own come apart with even casual use. They feel that the outrageous prices of such products are totally justified and they evangelize their favorites with passion. There's really no difference between these Gucci/LV/Versace lovers and many Apple lovers. They love their companies and are incapable of objectivity. That's not to say that the designers, or Apple, are bad, but you don't ask customers their opinions and expect objective results.
"This is pretty close to 7200 rpm if this logic holds. "
I don't that's a very good way to look at it, but it's a fact that greater data density means more bits flying under the head at the same spin speeds. This results in performance gains through both obvious and non-obvious mechanisms. I was simply pointing out the non-obvious ones.
Having benchamarked many, many drives in a previous lifetime as a RAID engineer, my rule of thumb is always go with the largest capacity drive. Obviously there's a limit to how much performance benefit it will give you compared to faster spindles, but I'm confident that the current generation 160GB will run with the older, faster 100GB and the extra 60GB will always get used. If I were Apple I would have dropped the option entirely.
The whole world doesn't edit on FCP. Believe it or not, video editing is done on Windows machines despite what Jobs says.
"asking a video editor to change from FCP to Avid in order to save a few hundred bucks on hardware is ridiculous"
Who ever suggested that? This discussion never considered price. This was the statement I disputed:
"I'll go you one better. Try to find a Dell that has a firewire 800? Most people are I'm sure saying why would you need that? Two words, video editing. If you have to push around massive amounts of data it leaves all other systems in the dust."
Notice that he's calling Dell out for not having FW800. That assumes that the video editing he wants to do could possibly be run on a Dell in the first place. It's no surprise that FCP was used in response since it's a typical ploy. Make an indefensible claim, then when called on it change the argument to say that only whatever Apple offers can be used. Thus it is here with FCP.
There is more to video editing that FC and Avid. Problem is that the others don't run on mac, and if they don't run on mac they can't possibly be good, right? Creative types are always the best with objectivity.
The fact is that FW800 isn't necessary to edit video and there are alternatives that are just as good if not better. If you need a notebook to edit video on, you're best off with a larger one that can take multiple disk drives and provide the most screen real estate possible. The MBP isn't competitive at either of those. Even if a PC notebook HAD to use an external drive, one could always add a CARDBUS SATA or Firewire interface.
Of course, because you can't edit video without having Final Cut. We all know that anything Apple offers has to be better than what's offered by anyone else, at least that's the typical story of a mac user. Yes, I've done video editing. Yes, I've done it on a notebook. No, I don't use a mac to do that. I must be the only video editor in the world that doesn't use FCP! Don't tell that to AVID users.
No doubt the MBP is the best notebook available to run FCP. That doesn't make it the best notebook available to edit video in the park. Oh yeah, you didn't say you were editing video in the park. That must be because you don't take your 2 external drives with you. Perhaps if you had a better machine you wouldn't need to give that up. I've edited video in the bunk of a rocking boat 300 miles from shore. Wouldn't be doing that with external drives. I know. I've tried.
Got some news for you; prosumer video editing is not very demanding on disk bandwidth. DV/HDV speeds don't come close to using the bandwidth of even FW400. Now tell me you edit uncompressed.
Yes, but according to you, Gartner can have no opinion without being corrupt in spite of the fact that their in business to offer opinion. Your opinion wasn't that Gartner was wrong, it was that they were bought off.
"It really is no wonder [yahoo.com] that someone is paying Gartner to try and coax Apple out of the PC business [zdnet.co.uk]."
That's not opinion, that's libel.
As for your innocent vendor-neutral observations, say all you want now but your post speaks for itself. There would have been no need to link to Apple's stock price if all your were doing was posting a comparative price. If you were actually doing that, you would have been (a) accurate, and (b) thorough enough to link to the appropriate pages. For a computer scientist you sure aren't good at it.
Sure, but there are higher resolution panels for the 15.4 and 17" sizes than Apple uses. That wouldn't help you if you feel that 14" is as large as you're willing to travel with, but then the MBP wouldn't be for you in that case. I would buy a MBP with a 1920x1200 screen without hesitation, and there is no need for OS X to scale up to 130+ dpi to use it. That's what's clearly holding Apple back after all.
Then prove it. Prove that Gartner's article was motivated by corruption.
You're no tech head, you're a shameless, lying Apple fanboy and none of your post was an accident. Your link to Apple's stock performance relative to Dell shows your true intentions. BTW, you don't have to reinstall Windows to get rid of apps, either. That's what Add/Remove programs is for (not that you really care). It was all deliberate pro-Apple propaganda in the first place, and it's no surprise you got slapped down. There's always someone posting these intentional miscomparisions to make Apple look good.
Nothing replaces screen real estate, even excuses. PC's offer 1920x1200 in the 15.4" sizes and they have for many years.
Imagine how useful virtual desktops might be with some real resolution? If you think it's not useful then maybe Apple should switch to 9" VGA displays.
"Besides anyone serious about it is going to get the FW800 Sandisk media reader."
Haha, talk about worthless. Using FW800 for that is stupid. PC Card readers travel better than any dongle solution and cannot be beat for performance.
"Real pros can add a drive."
Sure they can, even in the hardest notebook ever made to replace a drive in (the MB's and MBP's). The 100GB 7200 is dead anyway. The 160GB is the one to buy.
"Seek times won't be helped by this increase in density however."
Seek times over the surface of the disk won't, but the average seek distance will dimminish and the likelihood that data will be found within the track or cylinder will increase. These effects reduce average seek times when you compare, say, the first 100GB of a 160GB drive to the entire 100GB of the 7200rpm option. That is the proper way to look at it since the OS, applications, and user data don't get bigger when the drive gets larger.
If you compare small, random I/O over the entire surface of the disk then you are comparing unfairly since the simulated app has a smaller working set on the 7200 rpm drive. Any drive inherently gets faster with a smaller working set.
No one needs it, but it's typical to read comparisons that trumpet the unique features of an Apple product as though there were essential.
Now, if you really wanted a great portable editing system you'd insist on 2 internal drive bays that run at native IDE speeds and a screen that offers better than 1680x1050 resolution. Plenty of PC notebooks offer that and they all leave an Apple notebook in the dust for that application.
Photographers would sure love Apple to offer something better than 100dpi screens as well yet Apple doesn't. At least Apple offers competitive processors now. The best thing Apple could do now is upgrade the 17" to 1920x1200.
That's not the only reason. Average seek distances go down with greater density as well. That is not always shown in benchmarks because seek testing is frequently done over a percentage of the disk regardless of capacity, but in real applications file sizes don't increase just because the disk capacity does. A user's data ends up being packed into a smaller percentage of the disk on bigger drives---effectively short-stroking the device.
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the 160GB wasn't just as fast as the 100GB 7200. After all, the 120GB nearly was.
You mean finally an Apple laptop with enough storage space. There have been PC laptops with dual and even triple drive options for nearly 10 years. Of course, the 160GB has been out a while. Apple has simply not offered it.
Most recently that's true. Back in the 90's it certainly wasn't. Nevertheless, it's not relevant. All manufacturers have their share of custumer complaints regarding quality of machines and service. Otherwise they'd all have perfect scores (which Apple certainly doesn't). Apple has certainly had their share of Intel notebook problems yet their satisfaction ratings are good. Asking customers how they feel about manufacturers is certainly a useful exercise but it's hardly an objective measure of quality.
"While there is only one source for Macs there are just about as many business apps for Macs as there are for Windows, some Mac versions of Windows apps, some from totally different developers or companies. Not only that but because OSX has BSD under the hood Macs can also run many Unix apps."
I don't think that's true but it isn't the core issue. Big business will not accept sole source. In fact, many won't qualify a vendor if that vendor uses a lot of sole source. That's why you see PC companies like Dell appear so conservative.
Any apps that have come to be available because of OS X and its BSD heritage don't matter. Apple gave up pursuit of business long before that. Apple doesn't sell to big business because it knows it can't. No doubt OS X is a perfectly suitable platform for it.
"As for Gateway, their hardware and tech support sucks."
That can be said for Apple and Dell as well (and it has many times).
Gateway was a company that attempted to take away Dell's marketshare from the bottom while Dell moved into larger accounts. Dell recognized it and split its desktop line into two: Dimension (to fight Gateway) and Optiplex (to sell to business). Dell recognized the need for a responsive product line to cater to the individual while having a business line with stability and longevity. In doing this, they beat Gateway into submission while growing to dominate business. Compaq did similar (and might have done it first, don't know) but Compaq couldn't match Dell's efficiency in build-to-order. Compaq's strategy was to subsidize desktops with their dominant and profitable servers while Dell's was to destroy Compaq's server profitability and force their desktop prices higher. We know who won. Gateway was never the player because it couldn't sell to business at all. PCs are all about business sales./.ers fail to realize that.
"It wasn't that they couldn't figure it out, it's that there is no real solution. With WIN32 you can ask that Windows not swap you, and you can bump your priority, however, there is no guarantee your memory won't be swapped."
I understand that, but you don't need a guarantee. If the difference in settings between 50% and 90% is a few pages per second then it doesn't matter. Anyone who's performance sensitive running PS *will* have enough memory and you know that because you're pinning it in OS 9. On the PC side, enough memory means the PS tunable isn't sensitive. That's my experience.
"You would be surprised, but not so when you figure out that swapping 4k pages (like Windows will) versus swapping 64k or 128k chunks of memory you are less likely to need (like Photoshop). The I/O difference is significant. For instance, Photoshop could swap, say, the undo buffer first as that is less likely to be used than the image. Stuff like that."
Yes, I believe I acknowledged that already. Your hypothesizing isn't proof that there's any benefit though and I asked for benchmarks. I've profiled the NT back in the days when I developed disk controllers and *you'd* be surprised just how well it manages to produce disk I/O's larger than 4K. You're assumption that swapping produces only 4K I/O's is just that.
"Marketing."
Well, now you're in denial. Prior to the G5, the mac was hopelessly outclassed in processor performance and memory bandwidth.
"In the 90s, all prepress was on Macintosh. That's probably still true, though I have been out of the industry for about five years, so I can't say definitively now."
Now THAT'S marketing. Apple would have you believe that all creative work is done on the mac. If that were true there would be no market for PC versions of software used for those processionals.
"...They knew their OS9 machines, and they knew how to be efficient with them."
I think I said that already, i.e. "It was familiar and OS X had a lot of issues early in its history."
"Ever wonder why that option exists? It is BECAUSE it cannot guarantee swapping by the OS, so as a hack, you allocate far less memory than is physically available in the hopes that Windows will not swap."
I'm not following your explanation, but the reason for any such feature is performance. It's interesting that the authors of PS felt they couldn't figure out what that setting should be on their own. Why do you think that is? If such a feature did have significant performance impact, you'd think they'd test a variety of configurations and tune the app appropriately. Frankly, I think it was a lame effort to emulate the mac platform by a bunch of programmers who thought in mac terms. No other PC app was like that.
"That option was first available on the Windows version in 3.0 of Photoshop; it was not available on the Mac OS9 version as it was not necessary."
You mean not necessary because the mac implemented it themselves to make up for their own lousy memory management? That is what this discussion is about, right?
"Hell, ever stop to think why Photoshop still creates and uses its own swap file? Why not just use Windows VMM? Ever think about that?"
Yeah, I've thought about it. I've even played with it by varying the PS settings for it on my Windows boxes. Love to see a thorough benchmarking of the feature since I'm not convinced it's important. It is a fact, though, that specific knowledge of an application can lead to optimizations of things like memory usage. OSes, which lack that knowledge, have a great deal of effort put into making them work well. Do you have any benchmarks that show Windows PS benefitting from the feature?
"All I am saying is that OS9 was very nice for applications like Photoshop that required large blocks of memory."
I understand that, but the bottom line is which platform actually ran Photoshop better? In recent history and up until the G5, Adobe said that the PC did due to the mac's relative lack of processor. If you recall, Abobe actually issued a press release stating that the PC was the platform of choice specifically because of performance, then they backed away from the statement when the G5 was announced. It doesn't matter that you can pin memory on OS 9. It only matters that the application runs well. According to Adobe it did not compared to the PC.
"..but any prepress person will tell you they dropped it for OS/X not by choice..."
You mean prepress people who use macs. Professionals who used macs frequently stayed with OS 9. It was familiar and OS X had a lot of issues early in its history.
Isn't it ironic that today's macs can't run software written for macs just 7 years ago yet, through available unix DOS emulators, they may be able to run DOS apps from 25 years ago? I used to do that with my unix boxes and I'd be surprised if it didn't work on OS X.
But why buy one when she can get one for free? The money goes in the savings account. Things she wants or needs she gets others to buy.
Not that I condone this kind of behavior or play the game, but I know plenty who feel this way. Entitlement is pervasive in society. It's all business and hot girls are in the business of using their assets to get ahead. Hot guys too.
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By your measure, jail time never helps society with non-violent offenders. It does, however, because it provides a deterrent to others who might consider committing similar crimes in the future. Few people respect the law simply because it is the right thing to do. The threat of jail time for many is all that creates respect for the law.
If you aren't going to back up laws with punishment there is no need to have the laws in the first place.
"You listed some of the best examples yourself: Just because you still have the death penalty, there aren't any less murders being committed in the States than elsewhere."
Sorry, this isn't proof at all. You can't compare murder rates in the US to other countries. Besides, the death penalty is a state-by-state thing.
"Besides, even if it worked, is this theory acceptable?"
Assuming you mean disproportionate sentences, then yes. They are used all the time. How about possession of child pornography?
"By its logic, as I understand it, every criminal would have to be executed, probably with some torture beforehand."
That's absurd. Death penalties only apply, where they are legal at all, to certain particularly heinous crimes. Torture is unconstitutional (in the US) and can't be used regardless. It's a fact, though, that cruel and unusual punishment, in countries where it's practiced, is an effective deterrent. Some countries use the death penalty against homosexuals and that practice is certainly effective in eliminating the population of openly gay citizens.
"Now, lets assume that this would actually work to some extent. Imagine what ridiculously small thing people would get killed for."
The bad application of a good idea is bound to yield bad results. You've proven yourself unqualified to make the laws, that's all.
More like no modern filesystem does it. Let's see some links. Doing what you suggest would be absolute performance suicide.
"Your argument only holds if the filesystem allocates space at the start of the drive and works its way to the end without leaving gaps when it fact it is optimized to do precisely the opposite. Files are dispersed across the whole drive in order to give them room to grow without fragmenting them."
Only if the filesystems designers want the performance to be crappy. Windows certainly doesn't do that and I doubt any other system does either.
"The only way your I/O can be guaranteed to remain within the first X percent of the disk is if you reduce the size of your partition accordingly."
Yes, that's called short-stroking and it is done in certain applications. We aren't talking guarantees here, though, we're talking effective performance.
"MacOS contains optimizations to put certain parts of the OS closer to the beginning of the drive, but these also benefit from higher RPMs, since the rotational latency is reduced."
Sounds like they've figured that out, too.
NTFS absolutely does not lay out its filesystem as you say as that would be moronic. Regardless, I certainly don't have it "backwards".
I don't agree with that. They're both subjective and nearly the same. Any differences between the two measures may well stem from hypocracy as much as anything else. Why would I recommend something to a friend that I thought poorly of? Why would I not recommend it if I thought highly of it?
There is absolutely no doubt that Apple customers think differently about Apple than PC customers think of any of the PC suppliers and that immediately alters the outcome of a customer satisfaction poll. It still tells you what people think but it is in no way an even playing field. If, instead, the poll asked what you suggest, I would claim that the result would be even more stacked.
Apple supporters evangelize vastly more than PC supporters (as you would expect from a minority platform) and they're much more likely to paint a rosy, problem-free experience regardless of whether it's true for them or not. They identify as a "member of the team" and frequently form emotional attachments to their computer that PC users, as a group, do not. PC users view the PC as a device whereas mac users view the mac as a lifestyle choice. There's no way a customer satisfaction poll will ever take that into account.
I have friends who are totally into fashion. They have their favorite designers and are totally blind to the consistent horrible construction quality of the apparel and accessories in spite of the fact that the items they do own come apart with even casual use. They feel that the outrageous prices of such products are totally justified and they evangelize their favorites with passion. There's really no difference between these Gucci/LV/Versace lovers and many Apple lovers. They love their companies and are incapable of objectivity. That's not to say that the designers, or Apple, are bad, but you don't ask customers their opinions and expect objective results.
"This is pretty close to 7200 rpm if this logic holds. "
I don't that's a very good way to look at it, but it's a fact that greater data density means more bits flying under the head at the same spin speeds. This results in performance gains through both obvious and non-obvious mechanisms. I was simply pointing out the non-obvious ones.
Having benchamarked many, many drives in a previous lifetime as a RAID engineer, my rule of thumb is always go with the largest capacity drive. Obviously there's a limit to how much performance benefit it will give you compared to faster spindles, but I'm confident that the current generation 160GB will run with the older, faster 100GB and the extra 60GB will always get used. If I were Apple I would have dropped the option entirely.
"Not if you use Final Cut, they don't."
The whole world doesn't edit on FCP. Believe it or not, video editing is done on Windows machines despite what Jobs says.
"asking a video editor to change from FCP to Avid in order to save a few hundred bucks on hardware is ridiculous"
Who ever suggested that? This discussion never considered price. This was the statement I disputed:
"I'll go you one better. Try to find a Dell that has a firewire 800? Most people are I'm sure saying why would you need that? Two words, video editing. If you have to push around massive amounts of data it leaves all other systems in the dust."
Notice that he's calling Dell out for not having FW800. That assumes that the video editing he wants to do could possibly be run on a Dell in the first place. It's no surprise that FCP was used in response since it's a typical ploy. Make an indefensible claim, then when called on it change the argument to say that only whatever Apple offers can be used. Thus it is here with FCP.
There is more to video editing that FC and Avid. Problem is that the others don't run on mac, and if they don't run on mac they can't possibly be good, right? Creative types are always the best with objectivity.
The fact is that FW800 isn't necessary to edit video and there are alternatives that are just as good if not better. If you need a notebook to edit video on, you're best off with a larger one that can take multiple disk drives and provide the most screen real estate possible. The MBP isn't competitive at either of those. Even if a PC notebook HAD to use an external drive, one could always add a CARDBUS SATA or Firewire interface.
Of course, because you can't edit video without having Final Cut. We all know that anything Apple offers has to be better than what's offered by anyone else, at least that's the typical story of a mac user. Yes, I've done video editing. Yes, I've done it on a notebook. No, I don't use a mac to do that. I must be the only video editor in the world that doesn't use FCP! Don't tell that to AVID users.
No doubt the MBP is the best notebook available to run FCP. That doesn't make it the best notebook available to edit video in the park. Oh yeah, you didn't say you were editing video in the park. That must be because you don't take your 2 external drives with you. Perhaps if you had a better machine you wouldn't need to give that up. I've edited video in the bunk of a rocking boat 300 miles from shore. Wouldn't be doing that with external drives. I know. I've tried.
Got some news for you; prosumer video editing is not very demanding on disk bandwidth. DV/HDV speeds don't come close to using the bandwidth of even FW400. Now tell me you edit uncompressed.
Yes, but according to you, Gartner can have no opinion without being corrupt in spite of the fact that their in business to offer opinion. Your opinion wasn't that Gartner was wrong, it was that they were bought off.
"It really is no wonder [yahoo.com] that someone is paying Gartner to try and coax Apple out of the PC business [zdnet.co.uk]."
That's not opinion, that's libel.
As for your innocent vendor-neutral observations, say all you want now but your post speaks for itself. There would have been no need to link to Apple's stock price if all your were doing was posting a comparative price. If you were actually doing that, you would have been (a) accurate, and (b) thorough enough to link to the appropriate pages. For a computer scientist you sure aren't good at it.
Love the widescreen and wouldn't consider anything else.
Sure, but there are higher resolution panels for the 15.4 and 17" sizes than Apple uses. That wouldn't help you if you feel that 14" is as large as you're willing to travel with, but then the MBP wouldn't be for you in that case. I would buy a MBP with a 1920x1200 screen without hesitation, and there is no need for OS X to scale up to 130+ dpi to use it. That's what's clearly holding Apple back after all.
Then prove it. Prove that Gartner's article was motivated by corruption.
You're no tech head, you're a shameless, lying Apple fanboy and none of your post was an accident. Your link to Apple's stock performance relative to Dell shows your true intentions. BTW, you don't have to reinstall Windows to get rid of apps, either. That's what Add/Remove programs is for (not that you really care). It was all deliberate pro-Apple propaganda in the first place, and it's no surprise you got slapped down. There's always someone posting these intentional miscomparisions to make Apple look good.
Nothing replaces screen real estate, even excuses. PC's offer 1920x1200 in the 15.4" sizes and they have for many years.
Imagine how useful virtual desktops might be with some real resolution? If you think it's not useful then maybe Apple should switch to 9" VGA displays.
"Besides anyone serious about it is going to get the FW800 Sandisk media reader."
Haha, talk about worthless. Using FW800 for that is stupid. PC Card readers travel better than any dongle solution and cannot be beat for performance.
"Real pros can add a drive."
Sure they can, even in the hardest notebook ever made to replace a drive in (the MB's and MBP's). The 100GB 7200 is dead anyway. The 160GB is the one to buy.
"Seek times won't be helped by this increase in density however."
Seek times over the surface of the disk won't, but the average seek distance will dimminish and the likelihood that data will be found within the track or cylinder will increase. These effects reduce average seek times when you compare, say, the first 100GB of a 160GB drive to the entire 100GB of the 7200rpm option. That is the proper way to look at it since the OS, applications, and user data don't get bigger when the drive gets larger.
If you compare small, random I/O over the entire surface of the disk then you are comparing unfairly since the simulated app has a smaller working set on the 7200 rpm drive. Any drive inherently gets faster with a smaller working set.
yet somehow this one won't get modded +5 informative.
Now how about a retraction of your ridiculous statement regarding Gartner? Somehow I don't think your pro-Apple propaganda was an accident.
No one needs it, but it's typical to read comparisons that trumpet the unique features of an Apple product as though there were essential.
Now, if you really wanted a great portable editing system you'd insist on 2 internal drive bays that run at native IDE speeds and a screen that offers better than 1680x1050 resolution. Plenty of PC notebooks offer that and they all leave an Apple notebook in the dust for that application.
Photographers would sure love Apple to offer something better than 100dpi screens as well yet Apple doesn't. At least Apple offers competitive processors now. The best thing Apple could do now is upgrade the 17" to 1920x1200.
That's not the only reason. Average seek distances go down with greater density as well. That is not always shown in benchmarks because seek testing is frequently done over a percentage of the disk regardless of capacity, but in real applications file sizes don't increase just because the disk capacity does. A user's data ends up being packed into a smaller percentage of the disk on bigger drives---effectively short-stroking the device.
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the 160GB wasn't just as fast as the 100GB 7200. After all, the 120GB nearly was.
You mean finally an Apple laptop with enough storage space. There have been PC laptops with dual and even triple drive options for nearly 10 years. Of course, the 160GB has been out a while. Apple has simply not offered it.
Most recently that's true. Back in the 90's it certainly wasn't. Nevertheless, it's not relevant. All manufacturers have their share of custumer complaints regarding quality of machines and service. Otherwise they'd all have perfect scores (which Apple certainly doesn't). Apple has certainly had their share of Intel notebook problems yet their satisfaction ratings are good. Asking customers how they feel about manufacturers is certainly a useful exercise but it's hardly an objective measure of quality.
"While there is only one source for Macs there are just about as many business apps for Macs as there are for Windows, some Mac versions of Windows apps, some from totally different developers or companies. Not only that but because OSX has BSD under the hood Macs can also run many Unix apps."
/.ers fail to realize that.
I don't think that's true but it isn't the core issue. Big business will not accept sole source. In fact, many won't qualify a vendor if that vendor uses a lot of sole source. That's why you see PC companies like Dell appear so conservative.
Any apps that have come to be available because of OS X and its BSD heritage don't matter. Apple gave up pursuit of business long before that. Apple doesn't sell to big business because it knows it can't. No doubt OS X is a perfectly suitable platform for it.
"As for Gateway, their hardware and tech support sucks."
That can be said for Apple and Dell as well (and it has many times).
Gateway was a company that attempted to take away Dell's marketshare from the bottom while Dell moved into larger accounts. Dell recognized it and split its desktop line into two: Dimension (to fight Gateway) and Optiplex (to sell to business). Dell recognized the need for a responsive product line to cater to the individual while having a business line with stability and longevity. In doing this, they beat Gateway into submission while growing to dominate business. Compaq did similar (and might have done it first, don't know) but Compaq couldn't match Dell's efficiency in build-to-order. Compaq's strategy was to subsidize desktops with their dominant and profitable servers while Dell's was to destroy Compaq's server profitability and force their desktop prices higher. We know who won. Gateway was never the player because it couldn't sell to business at all. PCs are all about business sales.
"It wasn't that they couldn't figure it out, it's that there is no real solution. With WIN32 you can ask that Windows not swap you, and you can bump your priority, however, there is no guarantee your memory won't be swapped."
I understand that, but you don't need a guarantee. If the difference in settings between 50% and 90% is a few pages per second then it doesn't matter. Anyone who's performance sensitive running PS *will* have enough memory and you know that because you're pinning it in OS 9. On the PC side, enough memory means the PS tunable isn't sensitive. That's my experience.
"You would be surprised, but not so when you figure out that swapping 4k pages (like Windows will) versus swapping 64k or 128k chunks of memory you are less likely to need (like Photoshop). The I/O difference is significant. For instance, Photoshop could swap, say, the undo buffer first as that is less likely to be used than the image. Stuff like that."
Yes, I believe I acknowledged that already. Your hypothesizing isn't proof that there's any benefit though and I asked for benchmarks. I've profiled the NT back in the days when I developed disk controllers and *you'd* be surprised just how well it manages to produce disk I/O's larger than 4K. You're assumption that swapping produces only 4K I/O's is just that.
"Marketing."
Well, now you're in denial. Prior to the G5, the mac was hopelessly outclassed in processor performance and memory bandwidth.
"In the 90s, all prepress was on Macintosh. That's probably still true, though I have been out of the industry for about five years, so I can't say definitively now."
Now THAT'S marketing. Apple would have you believe that all creative work is done on the mac. If that were true there would be no market for PC versions of software used for those processionals.
"...They knew their OS9 machines, and they knew how to be efficient with them."
I think I said that already, i.e. "It was familiar and OS X had a lot of issues early in its history."
"Ever wonder why that option exists? It is BECAUSE it cannot guarantee swapping by the OS, so as a hack, you allocate far less memory than is physically available in the hopes that Windows will not swap."
I'm not following your explanation, but the reason for any such feature is performance. It's interesting that the authors of PS felt they couldn't figure out what that setting should be on their own. Why do you think that is? If such a feature did have significant performance impact, you'd think they'd test a variety of configurations and tune the app appropriately. Frankly, I think it was a lame effort to emulate the mac platform by a bunch of programmers who thought in mac terms. No other PC app was like that.
"That option was first available on the Windows version in 3.0 of Photoshop; it was not available on the Mac OS9 version as it was not necessary."
You mean not necessary because the mac implemented it themselves to make up for their own lousy memory management? That is what this discussion is about, right?
"Hell, ever stop to think why Photoshop still creates and uses its own swap file? Why not just use Windows VMM? Ever think about that?"
Yeah, I've thought about it. I've even played with it by varying the PS settings for it on my Windows boxes. Love to see a thorough benchmarking of the feature since I'm not convinced it's important. It is a fact, though, that specific knowledge of an application can lead to optimizations of things like memory usage. OSes, which lack that knowledge, have a great deal of effort put into making them work well. Do you have any benchmarks that show Windows PS benefitting from the feature?
"All I am saying is that OS9 was very nice for applications like Photoshop that required large blocks of memory."
I understand that, but the bottom line is which platform actually ran Photoshop better? In recent history and up until the G5, Adobe said that the PC did due to the mac's relative lack of processor. If you recall, Abobe actually issued a press release stating that the PC was the platform of choice specifically because of performance, then they backed away from the statement when the G5 was announced. It doesn't matter that you can pin memory on OS 9. It only matters that the application runs well. According to Adobe it did not compared to the PC.
"..but any prepress person will tell you they dropped it for OS/X not by choice..."
You mean prepress people who use macs. Professionals who used macs frequently stayed with OS 9. It was familiar and OS X had a lot of issues early in its history.
Isn't it ironic that today's macs can't run software written for macs just 7 years ago yet, through available unix DOS emulators, they may be able to run DOS apps from 25 years ago? I used to do that with my unix boxes and I'd be surprised if it didn't work on OS X.
But why buy one when she can get one for free? The money goes in the savings account. Things she wants or needs she gets others to buy.
Not that I condone this kind of behavior or play the game, but I know plenty who feel this way. Entitlement is pervasive in society. It's all business and hot girls are in the business of using their assets to get ahead. Hot guys too.