What has that got to do with the discussion at hand except that you like to say it? We are talking about massive amounts of information being captured in government and corporate databases. We are talking about the creation of electronic shadows of people that will be attached to their physical person as they're identified by innumerable cameras that have been installed in public places by a government that is out of control, one that is jailing people at a pace never before seen in all of human history. About 700,000 pot smokers are arrested every year, often losing their jobs and homes because of it.
We have got to drop the consensual crime laws and respect the Constitution before we can trust the government with more toys. We're building technological systems supposedly to capture the next Timothy McVeigh, but once they're in place, it always turns out to be enough for bored cops to stand around and feed Cheech and Chong into the meat grinder and meet their arrest quota. Who stands up for these innocent people who are CURRENTLY being arbitrarily victimized? There is no accounting for the mistakes of the past and the present, and we're talking about mistakes that might be made with this technology in the future.
More than half of the prison population in America are there because of consensual crime laws. These are "crimes" that don't have victims. The victim's place at trial is empty. The accused is a fag, or Jew, or hippie, or crack addict, or nigger, or hacker, or terrorist, or communist, or atheist, or drug lord, etc. etc. etc. and the jury convicts him of being such. Or, the accused CONSPIRED with one or more of the following: fags, Jews, hippies, crack addicts, niggers, hackers, terrorists, communists, atheists, drug lords, etc. etc. which is even easier to be convicted of.
Every time you hear about the Drug War remember that each and every arrest involves a sting of some sort. The cops are the only ones involved who act deceitfully. Everyone else is quite honestly either selling or buying drugs, because they need to be sold and bought no matter what Jerry Falwell says. The cops are not the good guys when it comes to consensual crimes. Using force and deceit on people who have not themselves used force or deceit is a real crime.
> and extreme
Extreme describes the state of law enforcement in America precisely. They've been getting free training from the military for 10 years now, and it shows. They inflict mindless and hateful damage on the country at every turn, while it's just as easy to get away with murder or rape as it ever was. The money and glamor are all in underground drugs. You get promoted and paid off for punishing "sinners" not criminals.
Tell me again, what's wrong with catching criminals? I'm lost here. I always thought that catching the "bad guys" was a good thing
Yeah, but "catching the bad guys" is only a small part of what law enforcement does in America today. Most of the people who are currently in prison (over 2 million now, up from 1 million in 1990) are there because they did something that the aristocracy and/or religious leadership disapproves of, not because they harmed another person or another person's property. The law books are cluttered with unconstitutional garbage from every Tom, Dick, and Jerry Falwell who has come along in the last couple of hundred years. The "so help me God" that was recently tacked on to the Presidential Oath of Office is a fairly innocuous example, and the Drug War is a vicious example. Even so, we are only jailing or killing a small minority of pot smokers, rave dancers, migrant farm workers and their families, homosexuals, alternative political party members, etc.
The reason that it's controversial every time the cops get a new toy is because the new toy will result in a greater percentage of innocent people being arrested for peacefully, responsibly, and consensually gambling, having sex, using certain medicines, holding certain beliefs, having certain customs, enjoying certain kinds of art, etc. while they enjoy their God-given and Constitutionally recognized freedom. People who would have been left alone a year ago, or two years ago, or 20 years ago are being arrested today because of new technologies. If you are currently arresting 10% of the pot smokers, and new technology enables you to arrest 20% of them instead, that's hundreds of thousands of people who are going to get arrested, lose their homes and jobs, etc. because they smoke a little pot on weekends. Of course, you can only arrest as many as you can build prisons for, so new technologies like facial recognition also help to drive new prison growth.
If facial recognition in public places catches on, the authorities will be careful to fill the first hundred successful arrests with murderers and rapists, and the first hundred rescues will be missing children and old people and dogs. Then when the press dies down, they'll come for the peaceful ones by the thousands. It's way, way too easy to arrest peaceful people than violent people in great numbers, guaranteeing more funds for more toys and cops next year, and screw the Constitution and any sense of fair play, tolerance, or basic respect.
I recommend that you read Peter McWilliam's "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do", which is a definitive look at consensual crimes in America. Get it at your favorite bookstore or look at it on the Web:
> Monitors with ADC aren't common enough for
> the price to have dropped.
One quarter of the all-digital flat panels out there are ADC, and you don't pay a premium on them (Apple has 26% of the DVI market all by themselves). Compare all-digital flat panels and you'll see that Apple's are very inexpensive... they are cheaper in some cases than displays that have analog interfaces bolted on (VGA). In addition, Apple's displays are top quality and consistently receive excellent reviews.
Think about it and it makes sense. The quality of the display is much more important to artists and video people than it is to Excel users. Apple's customers are happy to be first in line to ditch all those old analog controls and go to an all-digital flat panel that is really better than analog.
> what's wrong with ADC is that Apple are the
> only fuckers using it.
ADC is just one of the standard DVI connectors. If you compare the more-common plain DVI with an ADC port, you'll see that they look almost identical. The ADC is a plain DVI that just has an extra part on the end that carries USB, power, and VGA (yes, it's in there, too, for analog displays). Anyone can use the ADC if they want to. There is even a third-party graphics card for IBM PC-compatibles that has two ADC connectors on it, that will drive two Apple displays (typically two 22" Cinema Displays).
If you buy a Mac and want to use a VGA display, there is already a VGA port on there. If you buy a Mac and want to use an ADC display, there is already an ADC port on there. If you buy a Mac and want to use a plain DVI display, then you can buy an adapter from Apple for $29 that turns the ADC port on your Mac into a plain DVI. PowerMac users have lots of choices for displays. The best analog connector (VGA) is on there, and the best digital connector (ADC) is on there, and the second-best digital connector is a $29 adapter away (just a short little cable). ADC was a bit of a drag at first, when adapters weren't as readily available, but now it is fine. Still, I am happier going from VGA/USB on a 1999 system to ADC on a 2000 system than continuing to use VGA/USB in 2001 and beyond like some manufacturers.
The slow economy right now has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of people got a computer for the Internet and have had enough of setting up, plugging things in, installing drivers, troubleshooting conflicts, applying patches, and whatever other things they didn't bargain for when they just wanted to get onto the Internet. Now, they don't want to go through all that again just to have a 25% faster system or whatever. The industry NEEDS to make things a lot easier in order to move forward. Apple is the ONLY manufacturer doing this. When I got my latest PowerMac, it cabled like this: plug mouse into keyboard, plug keyboard into display, plug display into computer, plug computer into wall power. I was already up and running on the Internet thanks to AirPort, and the PowerMac has a gigabit Ethernet port as well. That's easy cabling. What's more, because the display is receiving both DVI and USB, it becomes an integrated part of the computer... you never have to make any adjustments and you can't tell the OS anything about the display that it doesn't already know. You just turn on the computer and the display comes up at optimum resolution, optimum gamma, at full color depth, and even with color correction done by the ColorSync component of Mac OS. A Cinema Display only has a brightness control and that's it. Digital displays that use VGA require that the user interact with the display just like an analog display. That's not progress, and it's not making things easier.
Also, a lot of the criticizms that you read about ADC actually apply to all DVI systems. I read an article recently where the guy knocked ADC for being limited to six-foot cables, but this is a limitation of the entire DVI spec. It's that or use analog or get a repeater.
It's also worth noting that more than 25% of all-digital flat panels are ADC. It's not an insignificant technology. If you're going to make the switch from analog to digital (and all of us are going to do so at some point), then why not go from three cables to one cable at the same time?
FireWire and 1394 are the same thing, and use a 6-pin connector and are powered. iLink is unpowered and has a 4-pin connector. A 4-to-6 pin cable is all you need to go between the two, and they are cheap. All FireWire cables are cheap, because they're serial, not parallel (only one wire, not many).
DTCP has nothing to do with FireWire. Windows Product Authorization runs over the Internet, does that mean the inventor of the Internet is responsible for Windows Product Authoriaztion?
What you're missing is that DTCP and similar show up whenever you go from analog to digital. It's like a buffer. Companies pay millions of dollars to fuck around with these little schemes until such time as they realize that digital actually has benefits and embrace digital, and the sky didn't fall in, and it cut costs as well, and yada, yada, yada. Even with CD's, which don't have a copy protection scheme built-in (at least until recently), the high financial and technical cost of making CD's in the early 1980's was seen as a form of copy protection. Nobody thought of protecting the bits since they were so fucking hard to get onto the disc in the first place. Now, we see making a CD as trivial, but that only started many years later.
Some people here seem eager to knock Apple down, or paint them as some kind of evil and/or stupid company. I submit that this is a legacy of all the FUD we were fed along with our Wintel PC's in the 1990's. If you want to fight FUD, go to apple.com and see for yourself if Bill Gates was right all those years ago. Personally, I think post-NeXT Apple is the very definition of doing-it-right, right here, right now. They are smart, and their products are excellent, and unreasonably compatible while Microsoft's get less compatible. When the XBox becomes the Microsoft PC and three of the six big Wintel vendors fold and the other three survive by building XBoxes, all the former Apple FUD-meisters are going to look so idiotic with their "proprietary hardware" rants.
Think about this for a second: Microsoft's response to the digital music revolution was to replace the MP3 codec in Windows with one that tops out at 64kbs, and offer customers their own Windows Media Audio instead; Apple's response was to hire the developer of the leading Mac Shareware MP3 player, bring the product in-house, make the product easier to use, put it on every Mac they ship as well as offer it free on their Web site, release a series of iMacs with funky patterns inspired by MP3 visualization, and put out commercials featuring Barry White, Lil Kim, Smashmouth and many others with the tag line "It's your music. Rip. Mix. Burn."
So which of these companies just doesn't get it on copy protection?
FireWire makes connecting any 2 to 63 digital media devices together easy and cheap. Someone will find a way to abuse the resulting power; I think even more will eventually find much more interesting ways to enjoy it. So abuse it or enjoy it already. Either way, we have no choice but to go from analog to digital, because there are just way, way too many advantages to digital.
> Please rember trying to make bits uncopyable
> is like trying to make water not wet.
Maybe it is also true that "making bits uncopyable by most people most of the time is like trying to get piss into a swimming pool".
Personally, I think bits get less valuable every day, and that will only continue. They just won't be valuable enough to "protect" in this way in the future. There are too many of them, and it is too easy to make more.
By the way, it is also true that "information wants to be free", that "business people want information to be expensive", and that "Puritans like to put innocent people in prison". Taken together, the bloom comes a little bit off the rose.
Remember that this has nothing to do with FireWire per se. It's just the fact that a digital cable is replacing analog cables that makes all this copy protection stuff get even grosser.
FireWire is also replacing all those different digital audio cables that you have. Yamaha's mLAN does both digital audio and MIDI over FireWire, and is supported in Mac OS X 10.1. The buzz on mLAN is large with music and audio people. What we have now with all these different digital cables, plus MIDI cables, SCSI cables on hardware samplers... it's outrageous. MOTU is already shipping a FireWire multichannel audio interface for all the PowerBook G4's that are being used in music and audio now.
Really, with FireWire we're just talking about the hardware. What protocols or strange copy protection schemes you put over it are a separate matter; they can go over any digital cable. Better that they're all FireWire so devices can get on the bus in one step.
The problems that you're talking about are the result of going from analog to digital on the client side, and don't have anything to do with FireWire (it just moves bits between media devices). Yes, companies who have already lowered their costs thanks to digital on the their side now want to raise prices thanks to digital on the consumer side (charging for what is now the second view of a DVD is a raised price; so is charging for a "second copy" of music for the car and for a copy of a book that your friend can read). It's not surprising, and it will take some time to work out, although probably not as long as people generally think.
In the meantime, Apple makes it so cheap to do _pro quality_ media work that there will be plenty of state-of-the-art low-cost and no-cost media out there for smart people to enjoy. The connections that FireWire is making are just beginning... music and audio is also in the process of moving to FireWire (MOTU's already done it, and Yamaha's mLAN protocol is in Mac OS X 10.1). Imagine setting up a recording studio by just plugging 30 devices together with 29 FireWire cables, everything from guitar amps to synthesizers to microphones (it takes 20 different _kinds_ of analog cables today, sometimes 10 cables per device). It's just going to get cheaper and easier to publish without sucking corporate dick.
And if you support independent artists, they'll probably thank you back by not spying on you.
FireWire is not a computer technology. FireWire ports are on some HDTV's, all digital VCR's, all digital camcorders, some set-top boxes (TiVo is one), storage devices of every description (hard disks, DVD-RW/CD-RW, CD-RW, tape drives, etc.), printers, scanners, pro audio hardware, and on concept stereos if not on shipping ones (replacing all of the analog connections, including the ones between amp and speakers). Yes, and they're on all Macs built in the last year or two and also on about 40% of new Wintel machines, too (via add-on cards).
The key here is that you don't have to include a computer in a FireWire bus for it to work (unlike USB). A computer is just another device on the bus, which can hold 63 devices. You can plug a digital VCR and camcorder together and share information. You can plug amp and speakers and display onto that same bus and now you have a home entertainment center. You can plug a decoder of some sort onto a VCR and they will work together. You can plug a hard disk onto a TiVo. What makes it so easy is that it is entirely hot-plug and self-configuring, and to add a device, you just plug it onto the last device on your chain. Setting up a future digital home entertainment center will just involve hooking up the components with FireWire cables, one into the next, in any order, as long as you don't make a loop. Almost anybody can do that.
Anywhere you need to move a bunch of digital media around, it is being done today with FireWire, and for the foreseeable future, too. If you're not using it now, you probably will be soon. You'll buy a TiVo and it will be on there, or a new computer and it will be on there (Intel is going to put it on their mobos from now on, too... nice value point that my 1999 Macs have the same I/O as a 2002 PC).
The reason Apple is getting this Emmy is because in the last two years, the TV industry has seen FireWire ports appear on all of the devices that they use, from camera to TV and everything in between. Hard not to ask "who invented this magical technology that has enabled us to move digital video around over wires instead of analog video on huge 1/2 inch video cassettes?" It's a very big deal to replace an analog editing suite with a PowerBook and a camcorder and a Final Cut Pro and get better results at a small fraction of the price, too.
Yes, they did. It's in the article. That is why they are receiving this Emmy.
> as far as I know, they don't make digital video
> editing software.
The most popular consumer DV editing software is Apple's iMovie. The most popular professional DV editing software is Apple's Final Cut Pro.
> they don't make cameras
They don't make them, but every digital video camcorder has a FireWire port on it, and this makes them much more useful. Unedited video is like watching paint dry. If not for FireWire, I'd have a camcorder and a whack of boring videos stored on cassettes. Instead, I run through the same handful of cassettes over and over as I capture video, and then transfer to the computer and edit right away and then reuse the tape. The edited versions are stored on DVD video discs, which are easy to make and look great thanks to Apple's iDVD.
> "FireWire"... snazzy name
The snazzy name is not just marketing. Technically unsophisticated Mac users can quite commonly tell you all about how to use FireWire and AirPort, but will give you a blank stare if you so much as whisper "IEEE 1394" or "IEEE 802.11b" at them. The names are descriptive, and Apple's implementations are complete, straightforward, and easy to use. The world is not made up entirely of geeks. However, the fact that both FireWire and AirPort are compatible with IEEE 1394 and IEEE 802.11b respectively makes them geek-compatible as well. That's something Apple didn't used to do, but has been very good at for the past few years, culminating with Mac OS X.
> If they are given an Emmy for having nice-looking
> monitors... fine
This award is not really about how good the technology is, it's about the fact that for years people in TV have been saying "how will we go digital?". What is going to replace the venerable analog connections that wire up a TV studio? How is a TV director or editor going to work on a notebook computer, the way that a writer has been able to for a while? FireWire is the answer to all of this. If you were a TV director who was used to booking $2000/hr editing time in a room full of TV's and VCR's and rushing through a project, a $5000 package of PowerBook G4, Final Cut Pro software, and a good DV camcorder that can do all that and more (you have a camera, too) without watching the clock is _creatively liberating_. It's enabling not just more work to be done cheaper, but better work as well. For example, a director can make basically unlimited rough cuts that lead to a final cut that is really true to the creative vision. That's why Apple is getting an Emmy.
The Mac doesn't use ROM's anymore, not for years. In fact, machines that have ROM's can't boot Mac OS X at all, you have to have a machine that uses Open Firmware, which is an IEEE standard "BIOS" that Sun and others also use.
Today's Macs are one of the most standard machines you can find. Almost every component is either a true or de facto standard, including both hardware and software. Mac OS X is even POSIX compatible.
I think what the original poster here meant was that it takes a certain level of system integration to do some of the heavy multimedia lifting. A good example is making DVD video discs. If you buy any PowerMac except the basic one, you get everything you need included to do a DVD video disc right. Some parts are hardware, some parts are software, and a major part is tuning the software and hardware to work together. Other manufacturers just don't do that level of system integration. Apple even sells DVD-R's cheaper than anybody else, which is another component of selling DVD-making solutions.
CNN is replacing their analog edit suites and betacams with PowerBooks, Final Cut Pro, and DV camcorders. Instead of $300,000 of equipment in a dedicated room with 10 people running it, they send out two people in a car with a camcorder and a PowerBook and they get back a finished report (fully edited) before the car gets back to the office. FireWire makes this possible. All of the methods that were used to make TV five years ago are now being replaced with FireWire-based solutions. It's the standard for moving digital video around.
Emmy's are given by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (who are less than a block from my studio in North Hollywood) and are not publicity stunts. They take this as seriously as anybody takes their own core business. FireWire is a revolution in TV, and they're just thanking Apple for inventing it, having the foresight to do it right, too.
Yamaha's mLAN, which is the leading candidate for replacing MIDI and also moving multitrack audio around, also runs over FireWire, so the music industry is ready to go down the same road as the TV people. mLAN support is in Mac OS X 10.1, so this September will be the start of that process.
If you haven't used FireWire yet, go out and get yourself an adapter for your computer and get into it. Even just adding a hard drive with no drivers and no rebooting is pretty cool. Or 20 hard drives.
I've been writing DVD-R's for months (write-once data or video), and DVD-RW's for about a month, using the SuperDrive in my PowerMac (it's a Pioneer drive that also does CD-RW). The DVD-R discs are $10 each (from Apple, in boxes of 5), hold 4.7GB of data, and take about 20 minutes to write. I got rid of my slow tape drive and its expensive and fragile tapes, and now I have backups that are easy to access and will last longer (cheaper, too... paid for itself). I also have my portfolio on DVD video discs. Very easy to get pro results with Apple's software (the interface is the hardest part).
So, the HP drive has a "+" in between DVD and RW instead of a "-". For video DVD's, you need authoring software, and Apple has been selling that in spades for months now, also Compaq, using Pioneer's drive. The HP DVD+RW makes me think of USB 2.0, which is only amazing if you don't already use or know about the overwhelming popularity of FireWire. What does the DVD+RW media cost? Where can you get it? Does the drive come with authoring software? If not, then making DVD video discs is only a theoretical possibility. Yes, the drive can write the data (any DVD drive can), but there is so much more to it than that.
> The ideal situation is to pay coders who also care
> about their product. Perhaps some innovative
> solution needs to come along where people can
> support open-source programmers with tips or
> something.
Apple pays Jordan Hubbard and he also cares about the product. This is pretty standard Silicon Valley stuff from before the dot-com bubble got so big that nobody could see anything around it. Netscape used to be a really big happy gang of engineers who were building exactly what they wanted to build and being paid well for it. Microsoft doesn't want to compete with these kinds of companies, and has shown that it is willing to break the law to avoid competing with them.
Who gives a shit about branding? This is Slashdot, man. If you can run Unix apps on it with just a few tweaks then it is Unix. If it runs Apache, it is Unix.
Next you will be telling me that Windows Me is no longer Windows because it doesn't have an NT kernel.
> Well bsd code has helped mac users go from an
> archiac piece of caca OS to something at least half-
> dencent
There are plenty of people who could say, "Well, the Mac UI and application platform has helped Unix users go from an archaic piece of caca OS to something at least half-decent." Technologically speaking, Aqua is at least as much of a step-up over X Windows as Darwin (Mach/BSD/GNU/etc) is over the kernel and low-level of classic Mac OS... which you think is better is only a matter of whether you look GUI-down like most Mac users, or kernel-up like most Unix users. I've seen more than one Unix guy on the Web talking about how happy he is to have a bash shell open right next to iMovie and QuickTime Player, and more than one Mac user talking about how happy they are that their Mac hasn't crashed at all since they got X. Everybody is happy. Yin and yang together at last.
Yes, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack is byte for byte from BSD. Robert X. Cringely was talking about just that a few weeks ago in his pbs.org column.
Mac OS X is a Unix. We check our disks with fsck, and we see what's running with top (although we have GUI apps we can use instead of the command line if we want). Man pages are all there. The default shell is tcsh. Emacs and pico and Apache are all there in every installation of Mac OS X. Strip off the GUI and you have Darwin, which is a Unix OS that's clearly derivative of Mach, BSD, and NeXTSTEP/OpenStep.
Here is an interesting tidbit: it is taking a longer time for the bulk of Mac developers to port their apps to Mac OS X than it has for the bulk of Unix apps to show up. It's easier to make a case that Mac OS X is not Mac OS than it is to say it's not a Unix.
I mean, MacGIMP is here on Mac OS X now, and Photoshop doesn't even have a ship date yet (although it's been shown off publicly and is apparently just waiting for Mac OS X 10.1). The GIMP is running in rootless X Windows right on the Mac desktop. This is a Unix, buddy.
Even though Mac OS X has been certified as a Unix by the Open Group, you don't have to ask them anything in order to figure out if something is a Unix. Kleenex(TM) is a brand name, but it is also a generic term. When someone says, "have you got a Kleenex?" they do not care if you hand them a Puffs(TM) or whatever. When someone says they want "Unix reliability" they're talking about the general reliability of all Unix systems, not about Unix(TM).
Linux is Unix. GNU is Unix (although it is clearly not UNIX(TM), and the (TM) is the entire reason for the acronym). In every technical way, GNU and Linux were designed and implemented to be Unix operating systems. It is so much about compatibility that it's amazing to see people trying to act like Linux is an island.
It's not the most popular Unix yet. I think Steve Jobs said earlier that it will probably be the most popular by the end of 2001. Regardless, it's only a matter of time. They're shipping a lot of computers every quarter, and they've made no secret about the fact that Mac OS 9's days are numbered. Mac OS X 10.1 will be much more popular than 10.0. There are plenty of users who are waiting for the early-adopter phase to be over and for the apps to be coming fast and furious, and 10.1 is the key to that.
This doesn't take a single thing away from any other Unix, though... it's just that now we have a whole range of Unix to choose from, for any task that you could name.
Re:iBook Clamshells are quite durable as well.
on
A Few Baaaaaad Apples
·
· Score: 2
The iBook supports 1024x768 both internally and externally. jchristopher, you need therapy, man.
Apple shock mounts the hard drives in its portable computers. They are really tough, especially the iBook which is made for schools.
This guy just used a PowerBook G4 for the look and because he's a Mac user. It's not that the PowerBook wasn't rugged to begin with. Of course, now it looks like it's indestructable.
> How would this be explained to the general public?
Compare actual performance, which means putting third-party applications onto demo computers at retail locations, and timing complete workdays and/or complete tasks in major applications. Apple does both of these, yet somehow they are depicted as cheating because they don't just offer the customer a range of beige boxes at 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8GHz along with a spec sheet of compiler shootouts. I have never seen computers demonstrated with actual applications outside of the Apple Store. To me, that just says that Apple has nothing to hide. If you don't believe Apple's performance demonstrations, go to an Apple Store and use your own media and see what results you get.
> Why don't they benchmark the mac with anything
> other than PS, ever, ever, ever, ever?
They also benchmark with Media Cleaner Pro, which is a very widely-used media encoding application. At this past Macworld Expo NY, a Mac with a G4/867 in it took a Spiderman movie trailer from tape to Web, and then played the result, well before the similar Intel machine (1.7GHz P4) could even finish encoding the clip. Same task, same media, same application, same RAM, same hard disk, same graphics adapter. Only thing that's different is Mac OS / Windows, G4 / P4 and the mobo. The machines even end up being equivalently-priced (I think they use Compaq workstations for these tests).
> How could anyone question the validity of an
> application that has always been primarily a mac
> application?
Photoshop has been running on both Mac and Windows platforms for years and years now. It is optimized for Intel with the assistance of Intel engineers. It is optimized for the Mac by Adobe engineers all on their own.
I work in music and audio, and it is very performance intensive... all of your processing is done in realtime. The Mac runs music and audio apps faster, too. I get incredible performance in Cubase 5.0 on a PowerMac G4/733. You can fill up all of Cubase's plug-in slots and still have CPU power left over (there's a CPU meter built-into Cubase... that's how CPU intensive it is). Latency is also better on the Mac, and that's very important in audio.
Video, music and audio, graphics, encoding and encryption... the Mac is the best-performing machine for all of these. These are the tasks that Macs are BUILT FOR. It just so happens that everybody wants to do these things now, thanks to digital camcorders, cameras, MP3's and security. Doesn't magically make Intel machines any better than they are, no matter what the clock speed of the CPU.
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> Information wants to be free.
What has that got to do with the discussion at hand except that you like to say it? We are talking about massive amounts of information being captured in government and corporate databases. We are talking about the creation of electronic shadows of people that will be attached to their physical person as they're identified by innumerable cameras that have been installed in public places by a government that is out of control, one that is jailing people at a pace never before seen in all of human history. About 700,000 pot smokers are arrested every year, often losing their jobs and homes because of it.
We have got to drop the consensual crime laws and respect the Constitution before we can trust the government with more toys. We're building technological systems supposedly to capture the next Timothy McVeigh, but once they're in place, it always turns out to be enough for bored cops to stand around and feed Cheech and Chong into the meat grinder and meet their arrest quota. Who stands up for these innocent people who are CURRENTLY being arbitrarily victimized? There is no accounting for the mistakes of the past and the present, and we're talking about mistakes that might be made with this technology in the future.
> rare
More than half of the prison population in America are there because of consensual crime laws. These are "crimes" that don't have victims. The victim's place at trial is empty. The accused is a fag, or Jew, or hippie, or crack addict, or nigger, or hacker, or terrorist, or communist, or atheist, or drug lord, etc. etc. etc. and the jury convicts him of being such. Or, the accused CONSPIRED with one or more of the following: fags, Jews, hippies, crack addicts, niggers, hackers, terrorists, communists, atheists, drug lords, etc. etc. which is even easier to be convicted of.
Every time you hear about the Drug War remember that each and every arrest involves a sting of some sort. The cops are the only ones involved who act deceitfully. Everyone else is quite honestly either selling or buying drugs, because they need to be sold and bought no matter what Jerry Falwell says. The cops are not the good guys when it comes to consensual crimes. Using force and deceit on people who have not themselves used force or deceit is a real crime.
> and extreme
Extreme describes the state of law enforcement in America precisely. They've been getting free training from the military for 10 years now, and it shows. They inflict mindless and hateful damage on the country at every turn, while it's just as easy to get away with murder or rape as it ever was. The money and glamor are all in underground drugs. You get promoted and paid off for punishing "sinners" not criminals.
Tell me again, what's wrong with catching criminals? I'm lost here. I always thought that catching the "bad guys" was a good thing
Yeah, but "catching the bad guys" is only a small part of what law enforcement does in America today. Most of the people who are currently in prison (over 2 million now, up from 1 million in 1990) are there because they did something that the aristocracy and/or religious leadership disapproves of, not because they harmed another person or another person's property. The law books are cluttered with unconstitutional garbage from every Tom, Dick, and Jerry Falwell who has come along in the last couple of hundred years. The "so help me God" that was recently tacked on to the Presidential Oath of Office is a fairly innocuous example, and the Drug War is a vicious example. Even so, we are only jailing or killing a small minority of pot smokers, rave dancers, migrant farm workers and their families, homosexuals, alternative political party members, etc.
The reason that it's controversial every time the cops get a new toy is because the new toy will result in a greater percentage of innocent people being arrested for peacefully, responsibly, and consensually gambling, having sex, using certain medicines, holding certain beliefs, having certain customs, enjoying certain kinds of art, etc. while they enjoy their God-given and Constitutionally recognized freedom. People who would have been left alone a year ago, or two years ago, or 20 years ago are being arrested today because of new technologies. If you are currently arresting 10% of the pot smokers, and new technology enables you to arrest 20% of them instead, that's hundreds of thousands of people who are going to get arrested, lose their homes and jobs, etc. because they smoke a little pot on weekends. Of course, you can only arrest as many as you can build prisons for, so new technologies like facial recognition also help to drive new prison growth.
If facial recognition in public places catches on, the authorities will be careful to fill the first hundred successful arrests with murderers and rapists, and the first hundred rescues will be missing children and old people and dogs. Then when the press dies down, they'll come for the peaceful ones by the thousands. It's way, way too easy to arrest peaceful people than violent people in great numbers, guaranteeing more funds for more toys and cops next year, and screw the Constitution and any sense of fair play, tolerance, or basic respect.
I recommend that you read Peter McWilliam's "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do", which is a definitive look at consensual crimes in America. Get it at your favorite bookstore or look at it on the Web:
Peter McWilliams' Web Site
> Monitors with ADC aren't common enough for
... they are cheaper in some cases than displays that have analog interfaces bolted on (VGA). In addition, Apple's displays are top quality and consistently receive excellent reviews.
> the price to have dropped.
One quarter of the all-digital flat panels out there are ADC, and you don't pay a premium on them (Apple has 26% of the DVI market all by themselves). Compare all-digital flat panels and you'll see that Apple's are very inexpensive
Think about it and it makes sense. The quality of the display is much more important to artists and video people than it is to Excel users. Apple's customers are happy to be first in line to ditch all those old analog controls and go to an all-digital flat panel that is really better than analog.
> what's wrong with ADC is that Apple are the
... you never have to make any adjustments and you can't tell the OS anything about the display that it doesn't already know. You just turn on the computer and the display comes up at optimum resolution, optimum gamma, at full color depth, and even with color correction done by the ColorSync component of Mac OS. A Cinema Display only has a brightness control and that's it. Digital displays that use VGA require that the user interact with the display just like an analog display. That's not progress, and it's not making things easier.
> only fuckers using it.
ADC is just one of the standard DVI connectors. If you compare the more-common plain DVI with an ADC port, you'll see that they look almost identical. The ADC is a plain DVI that just has an extra part on the end that carries USB, power, and VGA (yes, it's in there, too, for analog displays). Anyone can use the ADC if they want to. There is even a third-party graphics card for IBM PC-compatibles that has two ADC connectors on it, that will drive two Apple displays (typically two 22" Cinema Displays).
If you buy a Mac and want to use a VGA display, there is already a VGA port on there. If you buy a Mac and want to use an ADC display, there is already an ADC port on there. If you buy a Mac and want to use a plain DVI display, then you can buy an adapter from Apple for $29 that turns the ADC port on your Mac into a plain DVI. PowerMac users have lots of choices for displays. The best analog connector (VGA) is on there, and the best digital connector (ADC) is on there, and the second-best digital connector is a $29 adapter away (just a short little cable). ADC was a bit of a drag at first, when adapters weren't as readily available, but now it is fine. Still, I am happier going from VGA/USB on a 1999 system to ADC on a 2000 system than continuing to use VGA/USB in 2001 and beyond like some manufacturers.
The slow economy right now has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of people got a computer for the Internet and have had enough of setting up, plugging things in, installing drivers, troubleshooting conflicts, applying patches, and whatever other things they didn't bargain for when they just wanted to get onto the Internet. Now, they don't want to go through all that again just to have a 25% faster system or whatever. The industry NEEDS to make things a lot easier in order to move forward. Apple is the ONLY manufacturer doing this. When I got my latest PowerMac, it cabled like this: plug mouse into keyboard, plug keyboard into display, plug display into computer, plug computer into wall power. I was already up and running on the Internet thanks to AirPort, and the PowerMac has a gigabit Ethernet port as well. That's easy cabling. What's more, because the display is receiving both DVI and USB, it becomes an integrated part of the computer
Also, a lot of the criticizms that you read about ADC actually apply to all DVI systems. I read an article recently where the guy knocked ADC for being limited to six-foot cables, but this is a limitation of the entire DVI spec. It's that or use analog or get a repeater.
It's also worth noting that more than 25% of all-digital flat panels are ADC. It's not an insignificant technology. If you're going to make the switch from analog to digital (and all of us are going to do so at some point), then why not go from three cables to one cable at the same time?
FireWire and 1394 are the same thing, and use a 6-pin connector and are powered. iLink is unpowered and has a 4-pin connector. A 4-to-6 pin cable is all you need to go between the two, and they are cheap. All FireWire cables are cheap, because they're serial, not parallel (only one wire, not many).
DTCP has nothing to do with FireWire. Windows Product Authorization runs over the Internet, does that mean the inventor of the Internet is responsible for Windows Product Authoriaztion?
What you're missing is that DTCP and similar show up whenever you go from analog to digital. It's like a buffer. Companies pay millions of dollars to fuck around with these little schemes until such time as they realize that digital actually has benefits and embrace digital, and the sky didn't fall in, and it cut costs as well, and yada, yada, yada. Even with CD's, which don't have a copy protection scheme built-in (at least until recently), the high financial and technical cost of making CD's in the early 1980's was seen as a form of copy protection. Nobody thought of protecting the bits since they were so fucking hard to get onto the disc in the first place. Now, we see making a CD as trivial, but that only started many years later.
Some people here seem eager to knock Apple down, or paint them as some kind of evil and/or stupid company. I submit that this is a legacy of all the FUD we were fed along with our Wintel PC's in the 1990's. If you want to fight FUD, go to apple.com and see for yourself if Bill Gates was right all those years ago. Personally, I think post-NeXT Apple is the very definition of doing-it-right, right here, right now. They are smart, and their products are excellent, and unreasonably compatible while Microsoft's get less compatible. When the XBox becomes the Microsoft PC and three of the six big Wintel vendors fold and the other three survive by building XBoxes, all the former Apple FUD-meisters are going to look so idiotic with their "proprietary hardware" rants.
Think about this for a second: Microsoft's response to the digital music revolution was to replace the MP3 codec in Windows with one that tops out at 64kbs, and offer customers their own Windows Media Audio instead; Apple's response was to hire the developer of the leading Mac Shareware MP3 player, bring the product in-house, make the product easier to use, put it on every Mac they ship as well as offer it free on their Web site, release a series of iMacs with funky patterns inspired by MP3 visualization, and put out commercials featuring Barry White, Lil Kim, Smashmouth and many others with the tag line "It's your music. Rip. Mix. Burn."
So which of these companies just doesn't get it on copy protection?
FireWire makes connecting any 2 to 63 digital media devices together easy and cheap. Someone will find a way to abuse the resulting power; I think even more will eventually find much more interesting ways to enjoy it. So abuse it or enjoy it already. Either way, we have no choice but to go from analog to digital, because there are just way, way too many advantages to digital.
> Please rember trying to make bits uncopyable
> is like trying to make water not wet.
Maybe it is also true that "making bits uncopyable by most people most of the time is like trying to get piss into a swimming pool".
Personally, I think bits get less valuable every day, and that will only continue. They just won't be valuable enough to "protect" in this way in the future. There are too many of them, and it is too easy to make more.
By the way, it is also true that "information wants to be free", that "business people want information to be expensive", and that "Puritans like to put innocent people in prison". Taken together, the bloom comes a little bit off the rose.
Remember that this has nothing to do with FireWire per se. It's just the fact that a digital cable is replacing analog cables that makes all this copy protection stuff get even grosser.
> Of course, I could be completely wrong.
You are completely wrong.
FireWire is also replacing all those different digital audio cables that you have. Yamaha's mLAN does both digital audio and MIDI over FireWire, and is supported in Mac OS X 10.1. The buzz on mLAN is large with music and audio people. What we have now with all these different digital cables, plus MIDI cables, SCSI cables on hardware samplers ... it's outrageous. MOTU is already shipping a FireWire multichannel audio interface for all the PowerBook G4's that are being used in music and audio now.
Really, with FireWire we're just talking about the hardware. What protocols or strange copy protection schemes you put over it are a separate matter; they can go over any digital cable. Better that they're all FireWire so devices can get on the bus in one step.
The problems that you're talking about are the result of going from analog to digital on the client side, and don't have anything to do with FireWire (it just moves bits between media devices). Yes, companies who have already lowered their costs thanks to digital on the their side now want to raise prices thanks to digital on the consumer side (charging for what is now the second view of a DVD is a raised price; so is charging for a "second copy" of music for the car and for a copy of a book that your friend can read). It's not surprising, and it will take some time to work out, although probably not as long as people generally think.
... music and audio is also in the process of moving to FireWire (MOTU's already done it, and Yamaha's mLAN protocol is in Mac OS X 10.1). Imagine setting up a recording studio by just plugging 30 devices together with 29 FireWire cables, everything from guitar amps to synthesizers to microphones (it takes 20 different _kinds_ of analog cables today, sometimes 10 cables per device). It's just going to get cheaper and easier to publish without sucking corporate dick.
In the meantime, Apple makes it so cheap to do _pro quality_ media work that there will be plenty of state-of-the-art low-cost and no-cost media out there for smart people to enjoy. The connections that FireWire is making are just beginning
And if you support independent artists, they'll probably thank you back by not spying on you.
FireWire is not a computer technology. FireWire ports are on some HDTV's, all digital VCR's, all digital camcorders, some set-top boxes (TiVo is one), storage devices of every description (hard disks, DVD-RW/CD-RW, CD-RW, tape drives, etc.), printers, scanners, pro audio hardware, and on concept stereos if not on shipping ones (replacing all of the analog connections, including the ones between amp and speakers). Yes, and they're on all Macs built in the last year or two and also on about 40% of new Wintel machines, too (via add-on cards).
... nice value point that my 1999 Macs have the same I/O as a 2002 PC).
The key here is that you don't have to include a computer in a FireWire bus for it to work (unlike USB). A computer is just another device on the bus, which can hold 63 devices. You can plug a digital VCR and camcorder together and share information. You can plug amp and speakers and display onto that same bus and now you have a home entertainment center. You can plug a decoder of some sort onto a VCR and they will work together. You can plug a hard disk onto a TiVo. What makes it so easy is that it is entirely hot-plug and self-configuring, and to add a device, you just plug it onto the last device on your chain. Setting up a future digital home entertainment center will just involve hooking up the components with FireWire cables, one into the next, in any order, as long as you don't make a loop. Almost anybody can do that.
Anywhere you need to move a bunch of digital media around, it is being done today with FireWire, and for the foreseeable future, too. If you're not using it now, you probably will be soon. You'll buy a TiVo and it will be on there, or a new computer and it will be on there (Intel is going to put it on their mobos from now on, too
The reason Apple is getting this Emmy is because in the last two years, the TV industry has seen FireWire ports appear on all of the devices that they use, from camera to TV and everything in between. Hard not to ask "who invented this magical technology that has enabled us to move digital video around over wires instead of analog video on huge 1/2 inch video cassettes?" It's a very big deal to replace an analog editing suite with a PowerBook and a camcorder and a Final Cut Pro and get better results at a small fraction of the price, too.
> They didn't create "FireWire"
... snazzy name
... fine
Yes, they did. It's in the article. That is why they are receiving this Emmy.
> as far as I know, they don't make digital video
> editing software.
The most popular consumer DV editing software is Apple's iMovie. The most popular professional DV editing software is Apple's Final Cut Pro.
> they don't make cameras
They don't make them, but every digital video camcorder has a FireWire port on it, and this makes them much more useful. Unedited video is like watching paint dry. If not for FireWire, I'd have a camcorder and a whack of boring videos stored on cassettes. Instead, I run through the same handful of cassettes over and over as I capture video, and then transfer to the computer and edit right away and then reuse the tape. The edited versions are stored on DVD video discs, which are easy to make and look great thanks to Apple's iDVD.
> "FireWire"
The snazzy name is not just marketing. Technically unsophisticated Mac users can quite commonly tell you all about how to use FireWire and AirPort, but will give you a blank stare if you so much as whisper "IEEE 1394" or "IEEE 802.11b" at them. The names are descriptive, and Apple's implementations are complete, straightforward, and easy to use. The world is not made up entirely of geeks. However, the fact that both FireWire and AirPort are compatible with IEEE 1394 and IEEE 802.11b respectively makes them geek-compatible as well. That's something Apple didn't used to do, but has been very good at for the past few years, culminating with Mac OS X.
> If they are given an Emmy for having nice-looking
> monitors
This award is not really about how good the technology is, it's about the fact that for years people in TV have been saying "how will we go digital?". What is going to replace the venerable analog connections that wire up a TV studio? How is a TV director or editor going to work on a notebook computer, the way that a writer has been able to for a while? FireWire is the answer to all of this. If you were a TV director who was used to booking $2000/hr editing time in a room full of TV's and VCR's and rushing through a project, a $5000 package of PowerBook G4, Final Cut Pro software, and a good DV camcorder that can do all that and more (you have a camera, too) without watching the clock is _creatively liberating_. It's enabling not just more work to be done cheaper, but better work as well. For example, a director can make basically unlimited rough cuts that lead to a final cut that is really true to the creative vision. That's why Apple is getting an Emmy.
> How proprietory are the roms? Very.
The Mac doesn't use ROM's anymore, not for years. In fact, machines that have ROM's can't boot Mac OS X at all, you have to have a machine that uses Open Firmware, which is an IEEE standard "BIOS" that Sun and others also use.
Today's Macs are one of the most standard machines you can find. Almost every component is either a true or de facto standard, including both hardware and software. Mac OS X is even POSIX compatible.
I think what the original poster here meant was that it takes a certain level of system integration to do some of the heavy multimedia lifting. A good example is making DVD video discs. If you buy any PowerMac except the basic one, you get everything you need included to do a DVD video disc right. Some parts are hardware, some parts are software, and a major part is tuning the software and hardware to work together. Other manufacturers just don't do that level of system integration. Apple even sells DVD-R's cheaper than anybody else, which is another component of selling DVD-making solutions.
CNN is replacing their analog edit suites and betacams with PowerBooks, Final Cut Pro, and DV camcorders. Instead of $300,000 of equipment in a dedicated room with 10 people running it, they send out two people in a car with a camcorder and a PowerBook and they get back a finished report (fully edited) before the car gets back to the office. FireWire makes this possible. All of the methods that were used to make TV five years ago are now being replaced with FireWire-based solutions. It's the standard for moving digital video around.
Emmy's are given by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (who are less than a block from my studio in North Hollywood) and are not publicity stunts. They take this as seriously as anybody takes their own core business. FireWire is a revolution in TV, and they're just thanking Apple for inventing it, having the foresight to do it right, too.
Yamaha's mLAN, which is the leading candidate for replacing MIDI and also moving multitrack audio around, also runs over FireWire, so the music industry is ready to go down the same road as the TV people. mLAN support is in Mac OS X 10.1, so this September will be the start of that process.
If you haven't used FireWire yet, go out and get yourself an adapter for your computer and get into it. Even just adding a hard drive with no drivers and no rebooting is pretty cool. Or 20 hard drives.
I've been writing DVD-R's for months (write-once data or video), and DVD-RW's for about a month, using the SuperDrive in my PowerMac (it's a Pioneer drive that also does CD-RW). The DVD-R discs are $10 each (from Apple, in boxes of 5), hold 4.7GB of data, and take about 20 minutes to write. I got rid of my slow tape drive and its expensive and fragile tapes, and now I have backups that are easy to access and will last longer (cheaper, too ... paid for itself). I also have my portfolio on DVD video discs. Very easy to get pro results with Apple's software (the interface is the hardest part).
So, the HP drive has a "+" in between DVD and RW instead of a "-". For video DVD's, you need authoring software, and Apple has been selling that in spades for months now, also Compaq, using Pioneer's drive. The HP DVD+RW makes me think of USB 2.0, which is only amazing if you don't already use or know about the overwhelming popularity of FireWire. What does the DVD+RW media cost? Where can you get it? Does the drive come with authoring software? If not, then making DVD video discs is only a theoretical possibility. Yes, the drive can write the data (any DVD drive can), but there is so much more to it than that.
> The ideal situation is to pay coders who also care
> about their product. Perhaps some innovative
> solution needs to come along where people can
> support open-source programmers with tips or
> something.
Apple pays Jordan Hubbard and he also cares about the product. This is pretty standard Silicon Valley stuff from before the dot-com bubble got so big that nobody could see anything around it. Netscape used to be a really big happy gang of engineers who were building exactly what they wanted to build and being paid well for it. Microsoft doesn't want to compete with these kinds of companies, and has shown that it is willing to break the law to avoid competing with them.
Who gives a shit about branding? This is Slashdot, man. If you can run Unix apps on it with just a few tweaks then it is Unix. If it runs Apache, it is Unix.
Next you will be telling me that Windows Me is no longer Windows because it doesn't have an NT kernel.
> Well bsd code has helped mac users go from an
... which you think is better is only a matter of whether you look GUI-down like most Mac users, or kernel-up like most Unix users. I've seen more than one Unix guy on the Web talking about how happy he is to have a bash shell open right next to iMovie and QuickTime Player, and more than one Mac user talking about how happy they are that their Mac hasn't crashed at all since they got X. Everybody is happy. Yin and yang together at last.
> archiac piece of caca OS to something at least half-
> dencent
There are plenty of people who could say, "Well, the Mac UI and application platform has helped Unix users go from an archaic piece of caca OS to something at least half-decent." Technologically speaking, Aqua is at least as much of a step-up over X Windows as Darwin (Mach/BSD/GNU/etc) is over the kernel and low-level of classic Mac OS
Yes, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack is byte for byte from BSD. Robert X. Cringely was talking about just that a few weeks ago in his pbs.org column.
Mac OS X is a Unix. We check our disks with fsck, and we see what's running with top (although we have GUI apps we can use instead of the command line if we want). Man pages are all there. The default shell is tcsh. Emacs and pico and Apache are all there in every installation of Mac OS X. Strip off the GUI and you have Darwin, which is a Unix OS that's clearly derivative of Mach, BSD, and NeXTSTEP/OpenStep.
Here is an interesting tidbit: it is taking a longer time for the bulk of Mac developers to port their apps to Mac OS X than it has for the bulk of Unix apps to show up. It's easier to make a case that Mac OS X is not Mac OS than it is to say it's not a Unix.
I mean, MacGIMP is here on Mac OS X now, and Photoshop doesn't even have a ship date yet (although it's been shown off publicly and is apparently just waiting for Mac OS X 10.1). The GIMP is running in rootless X Windows right on the Mac desktop. This is a Unix, buddy.
Even though Mac OS X has been certified as a Unix by the Open Group, you don't have to ask them anything in order to figure out if something is a Unix. Kleenex(TM) is a brand name, but it is also a generic term. When someone says, "have you got a Kleenex?" they do not care if you hand them a Puffs(TM) or whatever. When someone says they want "Unix reliability" they're talking about the general reliability of all Unix systems, not about Unix(TM).
Linux is Unix. GNU is Unix (although it is clearly not UNIX(TM), and the (TM) is the entire reason for the acronym). In every technical way, GNU and Linux were designed and implemented to be Unix operating systems. It is so much about compatibility that it's amazing to see people trying to act like Linux is an island.
If it runs Apache, it is a duck.
It's not the most popular Unix yet. I think Steve Jobs said earlier that it will probably be the most popular by the end of 2001. Regardless, it's only a matter of time. They're shipping a lot of computers every quarter, and they've made no secret about the fact that Mac OS 9's days are numbered. Mac OS X 10.1 will be much more popular than 10.0. There are plenty of users who are waiting for the early-adopter phase to be over and for the apps to be coming fast and furious, and 10.1 is the key to that.
... it's just that now we have a whole range of Unix to choose from, for any task that you could name.
This doesn't take a single thing away from any other Unix, though
The iBook supports 1024x768 both internally and externally. jchristopher, you need therapy, man.
Apple shock mounts the hard drives in its portable computers. They are really tough, especially the iBook which is made for schools.
This guy just used a PowerBook G4 for the look and because he's a Mac user. It's not that the PowerBook wasn't rugged to begin with. Of course, now it looks like it's indestructable.
> How would this be explained to the general public?
Compare actual performance, which means putting third-party applications onto demo computers at retail locations, and timing complete workdays and/or complete tasks in major applications. Apple does both of these, yet somehow they are depicted as cheating because they don't just offer the customer a range of beige boxes at 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8GHz along with a spec sheet of compiler shootouts. I have never seen computers demonstrated with actual applications outside of the Apple Store. To me, that just says that Apple has nothing to hide. If you don't believe Apple's performance demonstrations, go to an Apple Store and use your own media and see what results you get.
> Why don't they benchmark the mac with anything
... all of your processing is done in realtime. The Mac runs music and audio apps faster, too. I get incredible performance in Cubase 5.0 on a PowerMac G4/733. You can fill up all of Cubase's plug-in slots and still have CPU power left over (there's a CPU meter built-into Cubase ... that's how CPU intensive it is). Latency is also better on the Mac, and that's very important in audio.
... the Mac is the best-performing machine for all of these. These are the tasks that Macs are BUILT FOR. It just so happens that everybody wants to do these things now, thanks to digital camcorders, cameras, MP3's and security. Doesn't magically make Intel machines any better than they are, no matter what the clock speed of the CPU.
> other than PS, ever, ever, ever, ever?
They also benchmark with Media Cleaner Pro, which is a very widely-used media encoding application. At this past Macworld Expo NY, a Mac with a G4/867 in it took a Spiderman movie trailer from tape to Web, and then played the result, well before the similar Intel machine (1.7GHz P4) could even finish encoding the clip. Same task, same media, same application, same RAM, same hard disk, same graphics adapter. Only thing that's different is Mac OS / Windows, G4 / P4 and the mobo. The machines even end up being equivalently-priced (I think they use Compaq workstations for these tests).
> How could anyone question the validity of an
> application that has always been primarily a mac
> application?
Photoshop has been running on both Mac and Windows platforms for years and years now. It is optimized for Intel with the assistance of Intel engineers. It is optimized for the Mac by Adobe engineers all on their own.
I work in music and audio, and it is very performance intensive
Video, music and audio, graphics, encoding and encryption