Wow... Every time I use OS X with anything less than 512mb I want to strangle Steve Jobs with a strand of dental floss. I remembered killing almost 10 minutes trying to SSH and look stuff up in Safari at the same time on a 256mb 15" G4 1.5 Powerbook. Absolutely horrible.
It's late May, HS graduation is around the corner and here comes Apple with its flagship college laptop. At this price point, and with these specs, I'm pretty sure Apple won't be able to fill demand. A it's an $1100 Apple engineered laptop with built-in webcam, wifi and bluetooth that can also run Windows (and run it VERY well) - AWESOME. Sure, nobody's going to be playing games on it - nobody ever bought an Apple laptop to play games before (generalization) - but 90% of college students aren't CS majors and there are probably more people interested in the iSight web cam then in 3D performance.
Not too big, not so small that you can't see the screen, with a LOT of horsepower under the hood and the incredible iLife package to boot. The only comparable performance/form factor laptops I can find after a cursory search are $1700+ VAIOs, so the price point is pretty great too. If I were a betting man, I'd be putting a buy order on some Apple stock today.
(All this said, the only one I would ever think about getting is the lowest-end model and dropping in some extra RAM.)
What's the equivilant to "Your papers please" in Slovak, and are they still asking it?
I have no idea, but isn't the american equiv "Can I see your driver's license/some identification?". And what happens when you can't ID yourself? My brother jumped a gate in the NYC subway and was taken back to his rented room in handcuffs, where he was able to produce proof of ID. We have a very similar system as Slovakia (including a document number and a social-security-style number), and the only two places I show my ID are at the bank and at the border, when going to another EU country. The police has no more right to randomly stop me and demand identification than it does in the United States, and the use of identification cards hasn't changed that at all.
It might be you who actually needs to stand up for your freedoms, and understand what kind of reality you're living in before talking down to others.
why would they spend the extra money for an Apple computer?
This might be because Apple computers are SO MUCH SEXIER than 99.9% of the PCs out there, and the same way people will pay $400-500 premiums for a cuter cell phone, they'll pay at least that much for a cuter laptop.
I'll admit it, I watch quite a few TV shows, all downloaded, all while I work alone at home (the quiet tends to drive me crazy after a while). Over the past year or so, I have been more or less actively noticing the computers they use in TV shows and they are almost all Apple. The thing I find funniest, is how they cover up the Apple logo. I'm setting up a website to document this phenomenon, and have records of everything from stickers (the most obvious), to post-its (center bottom on ACD monitors) and strategically positioned plants. Surprisingly, you can often find the big white glowing apple in a lot of shows, uncovered... ah, product placement at its best.
a PC with 90% of the features specs of the MacBook Pro might only cost $1,000
And this is different from any other PC hardware... how? How much faster is the Athlon FX60 over the Athlon X2 4600+? How much faster is the fastest RAM or GFX card than the one below it?
Specing out an HP commodity laptop vs a Mac Book Pro is like specing out a weeklong trip Warsaw, Poland (where I'm from) and a seculded island in the Indian Ocean. On paper, the trips might have exactly the same elements, but the experience is worlds apart.
Right on, although I don't think DRM was a factor in anyway. Small, unrecordable media that didn't play on any other kind of device with no exclusive content and a price point above that of DVDs. The PSP would've had to have been an incredible, runaway hit for it to survive.
Outside of a little ecomm, a few new sites and sites about truly local (city/neighborhood level) event, everything I use is outside out my country. That includes my photo hosting, web site hosting, email, dedicated servers, the dozenish online communities I'm an active member in. Not to mention MY JOB, which I perform via an extranet platform.
A regionalized internet would seriously hurt the net's diversity. I can't imagine waiting for someone from Poland to re-invent every application that I use right now. What would happen is companies that could afford it, would find markets that can support licensed copies of the app and invest in those markets. So all the little, quarky, cool applications/rss feeds/sites we use every day would disappear outside of their home markets. And that'd suck for everybody, except the corporation that could afford to franchise.
I remember doing an infokiosk project - alone - in a VERY short ammount of time (from zero to stand-alone touch screen app in 5 days). One of the functions was to have the kiosk print a half page on a standard HP printer. The page had a complex graphic layout designed as an EPS, needed to insert a picture taken by the webcam and print it along with other info. My solution was to have the infokiosk app (a flash player stand-alone, talking to an apache/mysql/php backend - I said this was done FAST) generate a PDF using some not-too-well-known pure PHP PDF library and print it out via a adobe reader command line command. Was it elegant? No. Was it the best solution I could come up with in the one evening I had to get printing done and working? Yep.
Without PDF's openness, there is no way I could've done it, especially in that time-frame.
1. They dynamic range of most pro DSLRs is comparable to (or better) than that of slide film. Using HDR techniques for things like landscapes, you can easily go to 8-12 stops of range. 2. What about them? Have you seen a 10 minute exposure out of the 5D? 3. Canon EOS 1D MkII N - 1225g (w/o battery) vs Canon 1V HS + PB-E2 - 1380g. Compare the weight and volume of 41 rolls of film a pro can go through on a single day of shooting vs the 7 SD cards he needs to do the same with digital.
So I tried to use GIMP 2.2.10 for more than 5 minutes, and as great an idea as that may have been, it didn't open CR2 files from my Canon 5D. So I thought, 'OK, the 5D is a new camera, it might not support right now, fine' so I reached from some CR2 files from my now-sold 20D - a camera released in early autumn 2004. That didn't work either. So I shut it down and switched back to Photoshop.
The single place that I've not seen a digital come close to my T90 or F1 canons is in FPS.. I can crank 4.5 frames a second through either of those machines, while an 8MP camera is still downloading third image it recorded.
The Canon 1D MkII N can do 8.5fps for about 47 frames, and then continue to go at 2fps until it dumps everything to the card, which takes 15-20 seconds, at which time it can go at 8.5fps again.
After that, you just have to wonder what you're shooting if you need 8.5fps for more than 5 seconds, and why aren't you just filming it?
And, frankly, a good digital P&S will beat your 35mm film camera in image quality in most cases.
Frankly, a good 35mm P&S will give you (in a certain set of conditions) results that are as good as a SLR and blow all P&S digitals away. Plus, they can give you one thing that no digital P&S can -- shallow DoF at short focal lengths. Try a good 35mm P&S (like the fixed lens Olympus Mju)
Film has it's place, digital has it's place. Right now, 35mm is pretty much dead in the water, other than a) broke college students b) film fans c) very specific jobs. Medium format is pretty great though, and not really all that expensive. The large negative size scans very well, even on flatbed scanners... that said, there's no way in hell you can shoot birds, active wildlife or sports with MF. It just doesn't work like that...
Also, I don't know how expensive MF really is. I never get my negs printed, developing is like $3-4/roll. My Pentacon Six TL cost $100 for a lens/body/prism system and I picked up a Moskva 4 6x9 for $75. The 40 rolls of 120 film in my fridge cost about $80. So that's pretty much $100 for the Pentacon, $220 for 480 pictures. Compare that to $3300 for my 5D and $300+ for each of my lenses (including some L telephoto glass up in 4 digits).
Still, digital absolutely distances film in terms of versatility, speed and ease of use. And that's why it's so huge.
In short, the G5 is a very mediocre CPU and has been behind the curve ever since the Opteron/Athlon64 came out.
I'd say even longer. I owned a 1st gen iMac G5 1.6 for a couple of months. It had a faster chip (in raw numbers) than my Athlon 1800XP+, faster FSB (400 vs 333), faster hard drive, just as much RAM, faster GFX card, etc. That said, the athlon smoked it so bad, it was embarrassing. I used the same applications, I did the same tasks... the Athlon machine was just MUCH faster, much more responsive and pretty much smoking.
Right now I have an athlon 64 x2 3800+. The entire rig, including 2GB of ram, 2 x 200GB HDD, fans and coolers to make it run almost silent, cost me $1000. For the applications I use (Illustrator and Photoshop) it pretty much takes the G5s I've seen and smacks them around a bit. I drop 16 80MB TIFF files into Photoshop and it just snaps open, RAW conversion takes seconds, filters apply in the blink of an eye. Awesome machine at an incredible price point.
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Wow... Every time I use OS X with anything less than 512mb I want to strangle Steve Jobs with a strand of dental floss. I remembered killing almost 10 minutes trying to SSH and look stuff up in Safari at the same time on a 256mb 15" G4 1.5 Powerbook. Absolutely horrible.
I LOVE my new MBP as well - it has all these features and I can run Windows when I want!
It's late May, HS graduation is around the corner and here comes Apple with its flagship college laptop. At this price point, and with these specs, I'm pretty sure Apple won't be able to fill demand. A it's an $1100 Apple engineered laptop with built-in webcam, wifi and bluetooth that can also run Windows (and run it VERY well) - AWESOME. Sure, nobody's going to be playing games on it - nobody ever bought an Apple laptop to play games before (generalization) - but 90% of college students aren't CS majors and there are probably more people interested in the iSight web cam then in 3D performance.
Not too big, not so small that you can't see the screen, with a LOT of horsepower under the hood and the incredible iLife package to boot. The only comparable performance/form factor laptops I can find after a cursory search are $1700+ VAIOs, so the price point is pretty great too. If I were a betting man, I'd be putting a buy order on some Apple stock today.
(All this said, the only one I would ever think about getting is the lowest-end model and dropping in some extra RAM.)
It's up to 25% in the EU (Sweden and Denmark, Poland's at 22%, Germany at 16%...)
What's the equivilant to "Your papers please" in Slovak, and are they still asking it?
I have no idea, but isn't the american equiv "Can I see your driver's license/some identification?". And what happens when you can't ID yourself? My brother jumped a gate in the NYC subway and was taken back to his rented room in handcuffs, where he was able to produce proof of ID. We have a very similar system as Slovakia (including a document number and a social-security-style number), and the only two places I show my ID are at the bank and at the border, when going to another EU country. The police has no more right to randomly stop me and demand identification than it does in the United States, and the use of identification cards hasn't changed that at all.
It might be you who actually needs to stand up for your freedoms, and understand what kind of reality you're living in before talking down to others.
why would they spend the extra money for an Apple computer?
This might be because Apple computers are SO MUCH SEXIER than 99.9% of the PCs out there, and the same way people will pay $400-500 premiums for a cuter cell phone, they'll pay at least that much for a cuter laptop.
and 4 hours unexplained.
Commuting.
I'll admit it, I watch quite a few TV shows, all downloaded, all while I work alone at home (the quiet tends to drive me crazy after a while). Over the past year or so, I have been more or less actively noticing the computers they use in TV shows and they are almost all Apple. The thing I find funniest, is how they cover up the Apple logo. I'm setting up a website to document this phenomenon, and have records of everything from stickers (the most obvious), to post-its (center bottom on ACD monitors) and strategically positioned plants. Surprisingly, you can often find the big white glowing apple in a lot of shows, uncovered... ah, product placement at its best.
a PC with 90% of the features specs of the MacBook Pro might only cost $1,000
And this is different from any other PC hardware... how? How much faster is the Athlon FX60 over the Athlon X2 4600+? How much faster is the fastest RAM or GFX card than the one below it?
Specing out an HP commodity laptop vs a Mac Book Pro is like specing out a weeklong trip Warsaw, Poland (where I'm from) and a seculded island in the Indian Ocean. On paper, the trips might have exactly the same elements, but the experience is worlds apart.
I don't know what it means to flash BIOS
Sure you do, Apple just calls it a Firmware Update.
I haven't flashed a PC Bios since my BP6 back in 2000 though.
As someone who lives in a country where the standard is to pay monthly, I would LOVE to have been paid bi weekly (back when I had a day job).
Right on, although I don't think DRM was a factor in anyway. Small, unrecordable media that didn't play on any other kind of device with no exclusive content and a price point above that of DVDs. The PSP would've had to have been an incredible, runaway hit for it to survive.
Outside of a little ecomm, a few new sites and sites about truly local (city/neighborhood level) event, everything I use is outside out my country. That includes my photo hosting, web site hosting, email, dedicated servers, the dozenish online communities I'm an active member in. Not to mention MY JOB, which I perform via an extranet platform.
A regionalized internet would seriously hurt the net's diversity. I can't imagine waiting for someone from Poland to re-invent every application that I use right now. What would happen is companies that could afford it, would find markets that can support licensed copies of the app and invest in those markets. So all the little, quarky, cool applications/rss feeds/sites we use every day would disappear outside of their home markets. And that'd suck for everybody, except the corporation that could afford to franchise.
Please link the dual core PC that's the size of a couple CD jewelboxes, and includes a DVD burner, wireless, etc at less than $799. Thanks!
There are whole markets (like... Poland - 39 million potential Apple customers) that can't use iTMS at all.
I remember doing an infokiosk project - alone - in a VERY short ammount of time (from zero to stand-alone touch screen app in 5 days). One of the functions was to have the kiosk print a half page on a standard HP printer. The page had a complex graphic layout designed as an EPS, needed to insert a picture taken by the webcam and print it along with other info. My solution was to have the infokiosk app (a flash player stand-alone, talking to an apache/mysql/php backend - I said this was done FAST) generate a PDF using some not-too-well-known pure PHP PDF library and print it out via a adobe reader command line command. Was it elegant? No. Was it the best solution I could come up with in the one evening I had to get printing done and working? Yep.
Without PDF's openness, there is no way I could've done it, especially in that time-frame.
Please, please, please tell me that you have a photo.
PLEASE!
Technically however, DSLRs do not surpass a decent 35mm camera with good film
Maybe in theory, in practice I have yet to see a test where - in a practical test - better quality was achieved with 35mm film than an EOS 1Ds MkII.
1. They dynamic range of most pro DSLRs is comparable to (or better) than that of slide film. Using HDR techniques for things like landscapes, you can easily go to 8-12 stops of range.
2. What about them? Have you seen a 10 minute exposure out of the 5D?
3. Canon EOS 1D MkII N - 1225g (w/o battery) vs Canon 1V HS + PB-E2 - 1380g. Compare the weight and volume of 41 rolls of film a pro can go through on a single day of shooting vs the 7 SD cards he needs to do the same with digital.
There are at least 6 DSLRs you can buy past your 10mp mark. What exactly are you waiting for?
So I tried to use GIMP 2.2.10 for more than 5 minutes, and as great an idea as that may have been, it didn't open CR2 files from my Canon 5D. So I thought, 'OK, the 5D is a new camera, it might not support right now, fine' so I reached from some CR2 files from my now-sold 20D - a camera released in early autumn 2004. That didn't work either. So I shut it down and switched back to Photoshop.
The single place that I've not seen a digital come close to my T90 or F1 canons is in FPS.. I can crank 4.5 frames a second through either of those machines, while an 8MP camera is still downloading third image it recorded.
The Canon 1D MkII N can do 8.5fps for about 47 frames, and then continue to go at 2fps until it dumps everything to the card, which takes 15-20 seconds, at which time it can go at 8.5fps again.
After that, you just have to wonder what you're shooting if you need 8.5fps for more than 5 seconds, and why aren't you just filming it?
And, frankly, a good digital P&S will beat your 35mm film camera in image quality in most cases.
Frankly, a good 35mm P&S will give you (in a certain set of conditions) results that are as good as a SLR and blow all P&S digitals away. Plus, they can give you one thing that no digital P&S can -- shallow DoF at short focal lengths. Try a good 35mm P&S (like the fixed lens Olympus Mju)
Film has it's place, digital has it's place. Right now, 35mm is pretty much dead in the water, other than a) broke college students b) film fans c) very specific jobs. Medium format is pretty great though, and not really all that expensive. The large negative size scans very well, even on flatbed scanners... that said, there's no way in hell you can shoot birds, active wildlife or sports with MF. It just doesn't work like that...
Also, I don't know how expensive MF really is. I never get my negs printed, developing is like $3-4/roll. My Pentacon Six TL cost $100 for a lens/body/prism system and I picked up a Moskva 4 6x9 for $75. The 40 rolls of 120 film in my fridge cost about $80. So that's pretty much $100 for the Pentacon, $220 for 480 pictures. Compare that to $3300 for my 5D and $300+ for each of my lenses (including some L telephoto glass up in 4 digits).
Still, digital absolutely distances film in terms of versatility, speed and ease of use. And that's why it's so huge.
In short, the G5 is a very mediocre CPU and has been behind the curve ever since the Opteron/Athlon64 came out.
I'd say even longer. I owned a 1st gen iMac G5 1.6 for a couple of months. It had a faster chip (in raw numbers) than my Athlon 1800XP+, faster FSB (400 vs 333), faster hard drive, just as much RAM, faster GFX card, etc. That said, the athlon smoked it so bad, it was embarrassing. I used the same applications, I did the same tasks... the Athlon machine was just MUCH faster, much more responsive and pretty much smoking.
Right now I have an athlon 64 x2 3800+. The entire rig, including 2GB of ram, 2 x 200GB HDD, fans and coolers to make it run almost silent, cost me $1000. For the applications I use (Illustrator and Photoshop) it pretty much takes the G5s I've seen and smacks them around a bit. I drop 16 80MB TIFF files into Photoshop and it just snaps open, RAW conversion takes seconds, filters apply in the blink of an eye. Awesome machine at an incredible price point.