Sorry, I don't buy it. I really don't mean to be rude, but if you were a creative professional, you would hardly be interested in this hypothetical "iMac mini."
You started out by saying that Tiger requires a "64meg card," which is wrong in two ways. Tiger doesn't have any graphics card requirements at all; it'll run on anything. And then, when you backtracked and said that you were talking about CoreImage, you were still wrong. CoreImage can take advantage a card with a programmable GPU that can accept pixel shaders. It's got nothing to do with the amount of RAM on the card. And it's certainly not a requirement; any image-processing kernel that can run on the GPU can also run on the CPU. In fact, even if your GPU is capable of running pixel shaders, if CoreImage determines that your CPU will do the job faster, it'll keep them off the graphics card. It's smart and scalable that way. You apparently didn't know this.
I'm sorry, I know I'm being harsh here, but it seems virtually certain to me at this point that you have just latched onto a buzzword. That always disappoints me.
Desktop publishing? That's been around as long as people had access to a typewriter and a copy machine after hours at work.
I wonder if maybe you're unclear on what I mean when I use the term.
Oh, well. Maybe you're just too young to have lived through the desktop publishing revolution. If you didn't see it with your own eyes, it's going to be difficult for you to understand what it really meant.
I think maybe we have different definitions of "desktop.";-)
Yes, of course there were computer-based electronic publishing systems before the Mac Plus. But I think we can agree that the Mac Plus with QuickDraw, LocalTalk, the LaserWriter, PostScript and PageMaker, as a package, were a quantum leap ahead, right?
PCI HIPPI (Don't have one yet, anyone know where I can find one?)
Yes, as a matter of fact I have a box fill of Essential HIPPI NICs in my closet. But you can't have one. The idea that you'd just plug one into some random computer just to say that you did it, frankly, turns my stomach.
Do you know what CoreImage and CoreVideo are? I don't mean to be rude; I'm asking sincerely. Do you know what they are and what they do?
Are you a developer? Like a serious developer, like you write visualization programs, or you do imagery exploitation? If so, you have every right to care about CoreImage and CoreVideo.
If you're a creative professional, you don't have a right to care. You should buy the fastest Mac you can afford and let the application developers care about how to implement their software.
See the distinction I'm making here?
CoreImage is, conceptually, very similar to SGI's ImageVision image-processing library, in that it's a software library that can, in the presence of the right kind of hardware, offload image-processing loops to the attached GPU. ImageVision did exactly that a decade ago, albeit only on SGI's own EXTREMELY expensive hardware. Were you clamoring for it then?
The only reason I'm making such a stink about this is that folks often have a tendency to latch on to brand names for no good reason. When you say "I want CoreImage," do you really have the foggiest idea what you're talking about? Or are you just saying "I want NewCoolThing?"
You know who the real unsung hero is? Sure, Jef Raskin had the idea and Burrell Smith designed the digital board and Steve Jobs beat people bloody if they didn't do what he wanted, but the real hero of the Mac is Bill Atkinson. He wrote QuickDraw practically all by himself, hand-coded in 68000 assembly, and the whole beast ended up fitting in something like 30 KB of ROM.
Holy cow, man.
Wow. Virtually everything you said here was wrong.
The Lisa was a commercial disaster. The Macintosh -- which lacked a memory management unit not because of shortfalls on Motorola's part but rather because it was deliberately omitted as a cost-saving trade-off --sold spectacularly well. The goal for the Macintosh unit was to sell 50,000 units in the first 100 days. They sold more than 70,000. The Mac exceeded every commercial expectation.
The real business problem of the Mac was that Apple basically saturated their market. Within a year of the Mac's introduction, everybody who could justify owning one owned one.
While it is true that desktop publishing was big for Apple, it's completely wrong to say that it "saved the Mac." To the contrary, the Mac created the desktop publishing industry. Apple had the Mac Plus and, as you point out, the LaserWriter, but those were just two pieces of the puzzle. The other three were LocalTalk, PostScript and PageMaker. These five things came together to be the desktop publishing industry.
So you see, it's wrong to say that publishing saved the Mac. It's more accurate to say that Apple and the Mac helped create desktop publishing. Apple built a product which saturated the market, so they went off and, along with some very smart people, created a whole new market. See?
That has, incidentally, been Apple's business model for the past 20 years. You saw it most recently with the iPod. Apple produced a product for a very small niche market, saturated that market, and used the resulting momentum to gain industry support and build a sort of coalition of businesses that could create an entirely new market: Internet music delivery.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm continually dismayed by the extent to which blatant anti-Semitism has become socially acceptable these days.
It's a damn shame how quickly we forget what that kind of thing leads to.
Sorry, I don't buy it. I really don't mean to be rude, but if you were a creative professional, you would hardly be interested in this hypothetical "iMac mini."
You started out by saying that Tiger requires a "64meg card," which is wrong in two ways. Tiger doesn't have any graphics card requirements at all; it'll run on anything. And then, when you backtracked and said that you were talking about CoreImage, you were still wrong. CoreImage can take advantage a card with a programmable GPU that can accept pixel shaders. It's got nothing to do with the amount of RAM on the card. And it's certainly not a requirement; any image-processing kernel that can run on the GPU can also run on the CPU. In fact, even if your GPU is capable of running pixel shaders, if CoreImage determines that your CPU will do the job faster, it'll keep them off the graphics card. It's smart and scalable that way. You apparently didn't know this.
I'm sorry, I know I'm being harsh here, but it seems virtually certain to me at this point that you have just latched onto a buzzword. That always disappoints me.
Desktop publishing? That's been around as long as people had access to a typewriter and a copy machine after hours at work.
I wonder if maybe you're unclear on what I mean when I use the term.
Oh, well. Maybe you're just too young to have lived through the desktop publishing revolution. If you didn't see it with your own eyes, it's going to be difficult for you to understand what it really meant.
I think maybe we have different definitions of "desktop." ;-)
Yes, of course there were computer-based electronic publishing systems before the Mac Plus. But I think we can agree that the Mac Plus with QuickDraw, LocalTalk, the LaserWriter, PostScript and PageMaker, as a package, were a quantum leap ahead, right?
PCI HIPPI (Don't have one yet, anyone know where I can find one?)
Yes, as a matter of fact I have a box fill of Essential HIPPI NICs in my closet. But you can't have one. The idea that you'd just plug one into some random computer just to say that you did it, frankly, turns my stomach.
Do you know what CoreImage and CoreVideo are? I don't mean to be rude; I'm asking sincerely. Do you know what they are and what they do?
Are you a developer? Like a serious developer, like you write visualization programs, or you do imagery exploitation? If so, you have every right to care about CoreImage and CoreVideo.
If you're a creative professional, you don't have a right to care. You should buy the fastest Mac you can afford and let the application developers care about how to implement their software.
See the distinction I'm making here?
CoreImage is, conceptually, very similar to SGI's ImageVision image-processing library, in that it's a software library that can, in the presence of the right kind of hardware, offload image-processing loops to the attached GPU. ImageVision did exactly that a decade ago, albeit only on SGI's own EXTREMELY expensive hardware. Were you clamoring for it then?
The only reason I'm making such a stink about this is that folks often have a tendency to latch on to brand names for no good reason. When you say "I want CoreImage," do you really have the foggiest idea what you're talking about? Or are you just saying "I want NewCoolThing?"
You know who the real unsung hero is? Sure, Jef Raskin had the idea and Burrell Smith designed the digital board and Steve Jobs beat people bloody if they didn't do what he wanted, but the real hero of the Mac is Bill Atkinson. He wrote QuickDraw practically all by himself, hand-coded in 68000 assembly, and the whole beast ended up fitting in something like 30 KB of ROM. Holy cow, man.
Wow. Virtually everything you said here was wrong.
The Lisa was a commercial disaster. The Macintosh -- which lacked a memory management unit not because of shortfalls on Motorola's part but rather because it was deliberately omitted as a cost-saving trade-off --sold spectacularly well. The goal for the Macintosh unit was to sell 50,000 units in the first 100 days. They sold more than 70,000. The Mac exceeded every commercial expectation.
The real business problem of the Mac was that Apple basically saturated their market. Within a year of the Mac's introduction, everybody who could justify owning one owned one.
While it is true that desktop publishing was big for Apple, it's completely wrong to say that it "saved the Mac." To the contrary, the Mac created the desktop publishing industry. Apple had the Mac Plus and, as you point out, the LaserWriter, but those were just two pieces of the puzzle. The other three were LocalTalk, PostScript and PageMaker. These five things came together to be the desktop publishing industry.
So you see, it's wrong to say that publishing saved the Mac. It's more accurate to say that Apple and the Mac helped create desktop publishing. Apple built a product which saturated the market, so they went off and, along with some very smart people, created a whole new market. See?
That has, incidentally, been Apple's business model for the past 20 years. You saw it most recently with the iPod. Apple produced a product for a very small niche market, saturated that market, and used the resulting momentum to gain industry support and build a sort of coalition of businesses that could create an entirely new market: Internet music delivery.
That's Apple's way. That's how they do things.
I searched about 1 hour for the problem Instead of spending five minutes to reboot? Yeah. Great use of time, there. You rock, dude.