How do you get quality analogue output from data stored in a computer?
I'm not the OP, but this is a problem that's bedeviled me as well.
Analog outputs from motherboards or even from high-quality soundcards are useless for hi-fi audio purposes. The environment inside a computer is just too cramped and electrically noisy. There is always some small amount of noise that varies with computer activity, which is infinitely worse than constant noise when you're trying to listen to music.
The solution is to go digital. My PowerMac G5 and MacBook Pro have built-in S/PDIF outputs. These days, most decent sound cards have them as well. Depending on just how much of an audio snob you are, you can rely on a receiver or preamp to do the D/A conversion, or even buy a strategically overpriced 30-lb. separate D/A converter with an unobtanium power supply and contacts made of a rare metal that scores of foreign workers had to die to extract.
Actually, my own solution is a little different: never do a D/A conversion. I feed the S/PDIF signal to a Sony ES digital amp, which converts it to a very high-frequency 1-bit signal that, after low-pass filtering and amplification, drives the speakers directly. Those amps' sound is considerably more technical and less "warm" than many analog amps -- and, since "warm" applied to an amp instead of a musician is just a code word for flattering distortion, I'm happy that way.
MacOS was a complete shitfest in the late 90s... even regular users were getting fed-up, the techies were long gone. I do find it kind of humorus that your types are still desperately trying to rewrite the history of MacOS8 vs WinNT, but I don't think you'll get very far outside of the Evangalistas.
This is a little simplistic. Even in the Mac OS 8/9 era (before OS X became usable for mainstream purposes with Jaguar), which is when Mac OS was technically most embarrassing, there were legitimate uses for it. Its worst weaknesses were the lack of the two PMs and any more than marginal multi-user support. On a dedicated-purpose workstation always running one stable application, it could achieve very long uptimes, and it had real security advantages over any of today's systems. Coupled with the total superiority of the PPC before the G4 stagnated in 2001-03, it's actually not that hard to see why even knowledgeable users in certain fields kept their Macs, and why Apple continued to sell $3000+ Power Mac G4s during the darkest days.
Now, for the majority of us, the story was different. I waited a very long time after I bought my beige G3 in 1998 to buy another machine, simply assuming the OS X transition was going to fail, the platform was going to die, and I'd need to switch to Windows when the G3 got Too Old. I didn't feel comfortable buying another Mac until the Aluminum PowerBooks and Panther came out in 2003.
Incidentally, one irony of this history is that Windows has become what many technically knowledgeable users feared the Mac would be twenty years ago: a system where it's almost impossible for the user to assert control over the OS at a granular level. What ultimately keeps me from switching to Windows (besides the superiority of Apple laptop design) is Windows and its applications' consistent and deliberate obfuscation of every modification they make, which has just gotten worse in every generation of Windows since 95, and which is promising to get even worse in Vista. Of course Linux in general doesn't suffer this problem, but I need an OS that will run mainstream music production software, and Linux ain't it.
Re:here's the proof that they're evil
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Death By DMCA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Trying to physically prevent copying is hardly the point of CSS.
The point is to remove fair use loopholes. With CSS, any unencrypted copy of a DVD is prima facie evidence of the crime of circumventing a protection mechanism (created by the DMCA).
CSS is there to make MPAA thuggery legally easier as much as to prevent any copying.
200 bucks for a Windows license? I don't think so. Are you so clueless that you think IT people drive down to the local computer store and buy a boxed copies of Windows???
Depends on the IT person's needs. If you're talking about big organizations, no. If you're talking about a shop that keeps its hardware long enough that an OEM license (which can't be moved to another machine) is cost-effective, no. If you're talking about a small business, quite possibly. Microsoft does not have good (or any) volume licensing options for very small numbers of seats.
Revenue goes down, but profits go up in almost every case outside of having 75-100 percent or so of your Mac customers stop buying your product.
...which is exactly what's going to happen. How can it possibly be in your customers' best interest to spend the money on Windows licenses and Windows support (especially when they've already demonstrated a preference against Windows by buying Macs) when they could just switch to the competition instead and avoid Windows entirely? Also, even those customers who continue buying your product in the short term are going to be looking at a completely different value equation when it's time to implement a major version upgrade or roll out the product to a significant number of new users.
If you're marketing to big enough organizations that the Mac users are only a small portion of the total, then, maybe keeping your product could still be the best value. But the impression I got from the OP was that he was marketing an integrated administrative product to small businesses, which are not nearly as likely to have both platforms, and which can save proportionally more by avoiding those expensive Windows costs.
In any case, we've only talked so far about the retention of your existing customer base. If you don't offer a Mac product, you will not attract a single new Mac customer. If you find you can be more profitable by shrinking or growing more slowly, fine, but that's not the approach most businesses are seeking to take.
Where people cite "business economics" for abandoning profitable products on a growing platform, dislike or distrust of the platform usually ends up being a more believable explanation.
The cold hard economic fact is that it is cheaper for us to drop the Mac version and let the small, but not insignificant number of companies with Macs, run our software under virtualization
This is absurd. None of your customers are going to buy $200 Windows licenses, and spend the considerable extra money for Windows support costs, to run your product. They will spend the money to switch to a competitor's product instead. If they wanted to run Windows boxes, they would have them. The fact that they've paid for Macs means they want to run Mac OS, not Windows.
Therefore, the real effect of your decision will be that you will lose your Mac customers. If you have enough Mac customers that your Mac software is a profitable product, you are going to lose money from your decision. If you didn't have that many Mac customers, you shouldn't have been making a Mac product anyway.
If management at your company has this little basic business sense, I'm glad I'm not relying on your product to operate my business.
I would rather buy a 2nd hand Ibook 12" G3-500 with the 8mb ATI GPU.
Oh, come on. Stop throwing a tantrum. No, the GMA950 is not ideal, and it certainly can't compete with the X1600 in the MacBook Pro, but it's proven to be far from a disaster in the Mac mini when working with the Core Duo. The combination of GMA950 and Core Duo will stomp any G3 or G4 iBook in any task but 3D gaming, where it will be roughly an even match. And if you were buying a Mac for 3D gaming, buying an iBook was a stupid thing to do anyway. Upgrade to a MacBook Pro.
For instance... it will play back 1080p H.264 (with a Core Duo), which no G4 iBook will. With 64MB It does spanning with the built-in display and an external display up to 1920x1200, which no iBook could do. It has enough horsepower to enable Core Image-driven special effects such as Dashboard ripples (and presumably whatever new eye candy is in Leopard), which the ATI Mobility units did not. Subjectively, it's smooth in any 2D tasks -- you can drag around all the windows you like, scroll nice and fast, and display complex layered images without excessive delay.
I'm sick of hearing "OMG INTERGRTAED GRAFIKS SUX0rZ!@!@1!!" I really want to know what everyone is planning to do, that they could ever have done on any low-end machine, that really won't work with a GMA950.
The newer stuff just doesn't stand out from the fray very well, especially stereo-wise, since high-end companies are offering entry level equipment at prices competitive with practically any component system, even Sony.
For the most part I agree completely... especially since most Sony components are not nearly as good now as they were in the '90s.
There is an exception, though, and it's what keeps me from going totally Sony-free after the r00tk1t episode. Their S-Master Pro digital amplifiers in the higher-end ES receivers (I have the 5000ES, which was replaced by the linked model) are genuinely terrific when playing digital sources. Astonishing imaging, cool and light, and enough power. To my ears the S-Master Pros don't just compete with the big boys' "budget" stuff -- they compete with high-end products costing several times what they do.
Of course, that just means someone at Sony screwed up. I'm sure the next model will be the usual crap... better buy another 7100ES now, before they rectify the oversight.:p
The point is that a truck is optimized to tow things, i.e. it has better fuel efficiency and lower emissions hauling a two-ton box of furniture than your geo metro. You'd think someone as environmentally conscious as you would understand the advantages of that.
That's exactly the point.
Current trucks aren't optimized at all for their intended purpose. They waste enormous amounts of energy with their high-horsepower engines coupled to too-tall gearing lugging around big ladder frames that are too heavy for the loads they carry and make good packaging impossible. The *only* task a current large pickup truck is truly optimized for is towing an enormous fifth-wheel trailer on the highway. The reason they are the way they are is because they're cheap to make in huge quantities and buyers don't know about better alternatives.
95% of U.S. truck and van drivers would be better served with different designs. For those carrying bulky cargo in the city (delivery people, repairmen), unibodies with high cubic capacity, small turbodiesels and short gearing would enhance carrying capacity, quickness, maneuverability and fuel economy with no significant tradeoff. Those working off paved roads in the country should have smaller, higher ladder frames with a torquier engine hooked to a real transmission/transfer case, for better off-road ability. And those towing trailers short of 15k lbs. should have trucks sized more appropriately for the job at hand, which would allow for better fuel economy and maneuverability (important for boat towers!)
As for your "lifestyle" logic, I don't think it's really difficult to distinguish between those things we believe society should provide its members (clean air, safe streets, emergency rooms) and those the members need to pay for themselves (the ability to tow huge boats). If you work hard enough you can turn every debate into a slippery slope. That doesn't make all debates worthless.
most boats -- such as mine -- are over 5,000 lbs with trailer and cannot be towed by a compact SUV or pickup since the length will result in a tail wagging the dog situation.
Get two things, coward:
1. a reasonable boat -- if your boat is over 5000 lbs, you have it just to show off how rich you are.
2. some driving skill -- there are lots of safe vehicles with heavy/long trailers on our roads; they're called semis.
Anyway, a giant V8 truck that can't be parked anywhere, drives like a drunken elephant and gets 12 mpg is hardly a "decent vehicle." I'll keep my Acura TSX, thank you.
brother is an electrical worker. He needs his Silverado. Not want, need. It gets bad mileage, but he hauls stuff around and it is not a company vehicle.
This is true only because we're stuck in the Stone Age of trucks in the U.S., thanks to undemanding consumers and truck makers who'd, logically, rather make fat profits than innovate.
Everywhere else in the world, there are high-cube vans powered by small, extremely torquey turbodiesels that carry considerably more stuff than our vans and pickups.
With their short gearing, those vans are plenty quick at lower speeds. And they get more than twice the mileage of our trucks. The only two things they are missing that our trucks have are the ability to tow very heavy trailers and the 100mph top speeds.
Dodge is selling such a Mercedes van in the U.S. as the Sprinter, but it's only one product -- not a full line -- and it needs European-style gas prices to be fully cost-competitive for most markets.
What about large families that need large vehicles?... How about someone who owns a boat and needs to tow it to a lake, so he needs a big V-8 or V-10? Should these people "feel the pain" when despite owning gas guzzlers, are driving vehicles they need?
Yes. Those are lifestyle choices. People should pay the costs of their lifestyle choices, not force the rest of us to pay them through artificially low gas prices that don't reflect the costs of maintaining a road network or fixing the environmental damage created by large, fuel-hogging vehicles.
Incidentally, you don't need a big V8 or V10 truck to tow most boats that most people own. Something like a V6 Toyota Tacoma will do just fine with all but the huge-ass, over-the-top showoff-craft.
Up to 5 times faster for many operations, but substatially slower for legacy software & software that relies on altivec.
Uhh... no.
Before I sold my 12" 1.5GHz PB last week I did substantial side-by-side testing of the 12", my 2.16GHz MBP, and my dual 1.8 G5 tower. All have enough RAM that swapping wasn't a factor. Keep in mind Rosetta is very RAM-hungry.
Essentially, the results boiled down to the following:
-For native operations without vector processing, the MBP was between 10-60% faster than the dual G5 and between 2.5-4x faster than the PB.
-For native operations with vector processing such that AltiVec could be expected to be doing most of the work on the PPC machines, the MBP was about 20% slower than the dual G5 and nearly 2x faster than the PB.
-In Rosetta, performance varied wildly (presumably depending on the complexity of the code and the number of native functions it calls). But it was faster than the PB at least as often as it was slower, and it was sometimes as much as 30%-40% faster. Certain operations such as opening very complex PDFs in Acrobat 6 were substantially slower, but these were the exception. Rosetta performance was never faster than the dual G5 (duh).
I just upgraded from a 1.5GHz 12" to a 2.16GHz/7200 (i.e. the hottest config) MBP. Parent is right about the difference in temperature between 867MHz 12" models and later ones. My late 12" only got hot if I pegged the CPU for more than 5 minutes.
The MBP is hotter than my 1.5GHz 12" was. Just how much hotter depends more on ambient temperature than CPU load. In a cool 65 room or outside, it gets slightly warm to the touch. In 80 or hotter conditions, it gets pretty hot (but still not untouchable), especially underneath and at the metal strip immediately above the keyboard. But even at its worst it's cooler than an 867MHz 12".
I think Apple still has a way to go on power optimization with the MBP. I get about 3 hours no matter what I'm doing -- whether testing in Cinebench or writing/. posts. The machine is almost totally unwilling to shut down the HD. The only thing that makes a difference is lowering screen brightness. It's not like the 12" where I could stretch the battery to nearly 5 hours by launching all my apps and opening all my documents with the power connected so the HD would never spin up.
I loved my 12", but eventually I just couldn't take the 1024x768 postage stamp. And the MBP in this 'roided configuration is much, much faster.
Perhaps you're not aware, but there are monitors that have been around for a few years that can do under.19mm dot pitches - mainly VIEWSONIC monitors. Some of the monitors going for (soon to be dead) SGI products boast a 15mm dot pitch.
I wasn't aware of these. Viewsonic's best has.20 mm dot pitch, which will *nearly* accommodate 2048x1536. Despite extensive Google searching I can't find anything smaller, including SGI whose lone remaining CRT has.25 mm dot pitch. I'd be curious to see data for specific models.
Electron guns are for the most part dead-on accurate (with given variances for electromagnetic fields not generated by the monitor)
Boats for the most part never leak (with given variances for the condition of the rubber in the gaskets)... Before LCDs were commonly available I used top-quality CRTs everyday. Even then, when 1280x1024 was bleeding-edge, there was always too much electromagnetic noise around to get a picture entirely free from distortion. A CRT hooked to a UPS, with the computer and the electrical system in a Faraday cage, might not be distorted at high resolution. In the real world, they are, usually with very minor but distracting curves in both vertical and horizontal lines.
BTW - try doing relevant measurements in any photoshop-esque program or such using inches instead of pixels as your measurement. Across LCD screens, you're about to see a MASSIVE variance due the overly large size of pixels on LCDs.
As a matter of fact, I have two wildly varying LCDs sitting in front of me right now, driven by the same Power Mac G5: an Apple 23" Cinema with.25 mm dot pitch, and a Samsung 193p with.29 dot pitch. I find it rather useful to be able to change scale, without losing LCD text sharpness, just by moving a window from one monitor to the other. Most programs capable of working in both inches and pixels allow you to adjust the onscreen dpi setting. Mine are set to 100 dpi, which is nearly perfect dimensionally on the Cinema Display, and allows me to see detail a little more precisely on the Samsung.
If you can point me in the direction of a real CRT, which I can test with my real G5, that will display 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 (for HDTV viewing), give me text as sharp as either of my LCDs, and weigh a reasonable amount, I'd be very interested. So far, I haven't seen or used that product, and I'm skeptical because of the practical difficulties inherent in VGA connections and CRTs in a room chock-full of noisy electronics.
Umm, if pixels are so small, why do I see them in almost every LCD screen or LCD projection I look at without having to really strain my eyes?
That's the point.
You can't see the edges of the pixels on your CRT because the CRT is blurry.
Assuming your 21" monitor is a 4:3 monitor, and (typically for 21" CRTs) that the diagonal of its viewable area is 19.7", the linear size of one pixel at 2048x1536 is roughly 0.195 mm. I have never seen a CRT with a dot pitch under.22 mm, and most are between.25 and.28. Your CRT is *not physically capable* of displaying all the pixels your video card is sending it.
Even if it were, a VGA cable/connector (or the analog part of a DVI one) is not capable of handling such a high-resolution signal gracefully. You are suffering further fuzziness because of interference between lines.
The fact that you can see the edges of pixels clearly is a sign a monitor is sharp. If you are uncritical, text and shapes may look better on a blurry CRT because the letter edges appear less jaggy, but for me the sharp edges cause much less eyestrain, especially with small, non-antialiased text.
Furthermore, some LCDs have smaller dot pitch than any CRT. The 1920x1080 15.4" LCDs sold by a variety of laptop makers have a.177 mm dot pitch. Some specialty monitors have had even smaller pixels.
I'm not going to deny CRTs have advantages, especially for gamers and color professionals. But they're just too damn blurry for working with text all day. And they have this nasty habit of weighing 100 lbs.:-)
Depth and weight. My current computer table, with all the music equipment I have on it, would not support an extra 77 pounds of monitor. Neither would my back, when I feel like reconfiguring things.
There's also the sharpness advantage of LCDs. The very best CRTs aren't too bad, but at the highest resolutions they all run into issues with pixels being smaller than the dot pitch. At that point there's absolutely no way text or images can be sharp.
750 (hard drive manufacturer GB) = 698.49 (real GB or GiB, depending on how anal you are).
As these sizes keep getting bigger the need to settle on one method of calculating GB, for both OSes and hard drive manufacturers, keeps getting painfully clearer.
Apple has abruptly learned a lesson about their customers and will certainly alter their behavior as a result.
As a longtime Mac user/community member, I can tell you this is not a big deal. The stories would have been *much* bigger if this were affecting any significant portion of users. Apple will, in its usual fashion, wait for the stories to blow over (which they will quickly) and then (too) quietly fix the problem.
I expect most users with problems simply overwrote their OS X partition with Windows. (The Windows XP installer doesn't make it at all clear which is which if they are roughly the same size. Apple users tend to be too cavalier to RTFM.)
Of the rest, most had probably run "the hack" or had custom partitioning schemes which they failed to ditch before installing Boot Camp. All this is covered in the FAQ.
I'm sure a small minority are having real, unexplained problems. But that's true with every piece of software ever released.
FWIW, Boot Camp installed and runs perfectly on my MBP. Fastest Windows machine I've ever used.:-|
ugh... I *hate* *hate* *hate* trackpad tap to click. The first thing I do on encountering any Windows laptop is turn it off.
I'm always clicking when I don't want to, closing windows, scrolling, selecting, etc. by accident. Tap-to-click probably cuts my productivity in half (no joke).
That said, a two-finger tap might be an OK right click if I could avoid also turning on the one-finger tap.
Still, after this long using Macs, Ctrl-click feels as natural as breathing. Now that I can do it with Apple Mouse Utility in Windows on my MBP I'm perfectly happy.
These are people with enough money and intelligence to realize that their time is worth more than the money they'd save by buying a PC with Windows.
I actually agree completely with this statement, but I want to also stick up for the users who, like me (I'm a student, and my time is not as easily monetarizable), just like OS X.
People should free themselves from the idea that, if they can't justify their preferences economically, the preferences are somehow "wrong." I buy Macs, spending a little more to do so, because I like them, both for their appealing hardware design and the intuitiveness and stability of OS X. I don't do anything (well, except run Logic Pro) that I couldn't do somehow in Windows. But I'm happy to pay for a more pleasant experience.
You'll still have to deal with Apple shipping Macs with yesterday's graphics cards.
What Apple ships isn't the problem, unless you're a hardcore gamer.
The problem is the lack of upgrade options.
For general-use systems, the Mobility X1600 and the 7800GT are perfectly current, and they'll run games OK (just not at 14020x9768 at 2000fps).
But my year-old G5 is stuck with a 64MB 9600XT... and *no way to upgrade!* No one is stocking the absurdly overpriced X800XT Mac Edition and there are no other options. Sigh. I hope the Intel towers will be able to use normal PC video cards.
Yeah, a PowerBook/MBP docking station would be nice, and I don't know why Apple hasn't made one (ExpressCard could handle it). But that's not the solution for everyone -- I have a tower with faster hard drives and 2 big monitors at home, so I don't dock. I use my DVI connector on the road to connect to monitors and projectors at remote sites, and VGA wouldn't always cut it.
I also like the trackpoint and wish it were available as an Apple option. I disagree with your characterization of the keyboards, though -- I find I'm faster with the Apple PB/MBP keyboards than the ThinkPad one. (If you're thinking of the flimsy iBook keyboard it's a different story.)
The other thing which the ThinkPads (and 99% of all other non-Apple laptops) is lacking is digital audio output. This is especially glaring as laptop analog audio hardware is both cheap and very prone to interference from inside the case.
By the way: stealth fighter = 1982.:-) Seriously, I'd love to buy other Core Duo laptops but I haven't seen one with a design even half as sleek and well-executed as Apple's -- and the MBP is only a slight evolution of a design first unveiled in 2003! Laptop manufacturers need to get with the design program. Garishmulticoloredplastic1.5" thick enclosures aren't good enough.
Thinkpads are well-built... near indestructible, actually, and from what I've seen that hasn't changed since the Lenovo takeover. But they...
don't have DVI (what, it isn't 2001 yet?) and therefore can't drive big monitors well
on most models, insist on taking up half the back panel with a gawdawful parallel port (oh, it's not even 1997 yet)
and are housed in ugly angular cases made of 1992-look shiny black plastic
I will say in spite of all that I find them very pleasant to use (other than the unfortunate fact they're usually running Windows).
To get back on topic... I bought a W8610 MBP (2.16, 2GB, 7200). After using it for awhile I can hear the processor noise. But I can only surmise some units must be much, much louder than mine to cause the reactions we've seen all over the net. My dual 1.8 G5 chirp is much, much louder. Even if the G5 fan is running in the same room I can't hear the MBP. And, even in a totally quiet room, it's not bothersome at all. Certainly not worth returning a unit with no dead pixels or apparent other issues to "fix."
And the machine is fast. It stomps my G5 in anything interface- or video-related and is roughly the same in most CPU-bound operations. I'm ecstatic with that level of performance in a 5.5 lb 1" thick gorgeous laptop. Now if I could only add 4GB RAM.
My dual G5, which runs Classic apps faster than any OS 9 Mac, might be inclined to disagree with you. "Classic won't exist anymore" when the first version of Intel-only OS X comes out, which will be no earlier than 10.6 -- presumably not before 2009. Until then, PPC Macs will be easily available and run a current OS. I'd rather Apple focus on the Next Big Thing than waste its time allowing me to run nine-year-old software on a new processor architecture. If I need to run obsolete software by then I'll keep the G5 in a closet and run it over VNC.
My experience has also been that Classic is very compatible. In fact, a lot of old apps that broke on the later OS 9-capable hardware run fine on Classic. That's not to say it's not an ugly kludge, but it's a pretty comprehensive one. The only apps I've found that broke either 1) are so old they expect a 512x342 screen or 2) use undocumented methods to directly access hardware. Comparable Win16 apps wouldn't run in today's Windows either.
Still, saying Windows is "slow" because of legacy cruft is bizarre. Windows is big and fragile, not slow, because of legacy cruft. Contrasting Windows with OS X in this respect is stranger, as OS X's most glaring non-3D-related weakness is really slow small-file I/O performance.
How does the notorious fragility and flakiness of Windows PCs have anything to do with DRM? They were that way when DRM was still a twinkle in the *AA's eye. If you had completely DRM-free media streaming from a Windows server you'd still have the same issues.
The general point is on target, though... non-geeks don't want to futz around with a computer just to watch a show. A living-room streaming device will ONLY work when you just hit a button on the remote and it works now, without lag and without the possibility of failure. Even iTunes streaming users, who have to navigate a complicated interface to get their tracks and who deal with occasional stability issues, know we're not there yet.
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How do you get quality analogue output from data stored in a computer?
I'm not the OP, but this is a problem that's bedeviled me as well.
Analog outputs from motherboards or even from high-quality soundcards are useless for hi-fi audio purposes. The environment inside a computer is just too cramped and electrically noisy. There is always some small amount of noise that varies with computer activity, which is infinitely worse than constant noise when you're trying to listen to music.
The solution is to go digital. My PowerMac G5 and MacBook Pro have built-in S/PDIF outputs. These days, most decent sound cards have them as well. Depending on just how much of an audio snob you are, you can rely on a receiver or preamp to do the D/A conversion, or even buy a strategically overpriced 30-lb. separate D/A converter with an unobtanium power supply and contacts made of a rare metal that scores of foreign workers had to die to extract.
Actually, my own solution is a little different: never do a D/A conversion. I feed the S/PDIF signal to a Sony ES digital amp, which converts it to a very high-frequency 1-bit signal that, after low-pass filtering and amplification, drives the speakers directly. Those amps' sound is considerably more technical and less "warm" than many analog amps -- and, since "warm" applied to an amp instead of a musician is just a code word for flattering distortion, I'm happy that way.
This is a little simplistic. Even in the Mac OS 8/9 era (before OS X became usable for mainstream purposes with Jaguar), which is when Mac OS was technically most embarrassing, there were legitimate uses for it. Its worst weaknesses were the lack of the two PMs and any more than marginal multi-user support. On a dedicated-purpose workstation always running one stable application, it could achieve very long uptimes, and it had real security advantages over any of today's systems. Coupled with the total superiority of the PPC before the G4 stagnated in 2001-03, it's actually not that hard to see why even knowledgeable users in certain fields kept their Macs, and why Apple continued to sell $3000+ Power Mac G4s during the darkest days.
Now, for the majority of us, the story was different. I waited a very long time after I bought my beige G3 in 1998 to buy another machine, simply assuming the OS X transition was going to fail, the platform was going to die, and I'd need to switch to Windows when the G3 got Too Old. I didn't feel comfortable buying another Mac until the Aluminum PowerBooks and Panther came out in 2003.
Incidentally, one irony of this history is that Windows has become what many technically knowledgeable users feared the Mac would be twenty years ago: a system where it's almost impossible for the user to assert control over the OS at a granular level. What ultimately keeps me from switching to Windows (besides the superiority of Apple laptop design) is Windows and its applications' consistent and deliberate obfuscation of every modification they make, which has just gotten worse in every generation of Windows since 95, and which is promising to get even worse in Vista. Of course Linux in general doesn't suffer this problem, but I need an OS that will run mainstream music production software, and Linux ain't it.
The point is to remove fair use loopholes. With CSS, any unencrypted copy of a DVD is prima facie evidence of the crime of circumventing a protection mechanism (created by the DMCA).
CSS is there to make MPAA thuggery legally easier as much as to prevent any copying.
Depends on the IT person's needs. If you're talking about big organizations, no. If you're talking about a shop that keeps its hardware long enough that an OEM license (which can't be moved to another machine) is cost-effective, no. If you're talking about a small business, quite possibly. Microsoft does not have good (or any) volume licensing options for very small numbers of seats.
Revenue goes down, but profits go up in almost every case outside of having 75-100 percent or so of your Mac customers stop buying your product.
...which is exactly what's going to happen. How can it possibly be in your customers' best interest to spend the money on Windows licenses and Windows support (especially when they've already demonstrated a preference against Windows by buying Macs) when they could just switch to the competition instead and avoid Windows entirely? Also, even those customers who continue buying your product in the short term are going to be looking at a completely different value equation when it's time to implement a major version upgrade or roll out the product to a significant number of new users.
If you're marketing to big enough organizations that the Mac users are only a small portion of the total, then, maybe keeping your product could still be the best value. But the impression I got from the OP was that he was marketing an integrated administrative product to small businesses, which are not nearly as likely to have both platforms, and which can save proportionally more by avoiding those expensive Windows costs.
In any case, we've only talked so far about the retention of your existing customer base. If you don't offer a Mac product, you will not attract a single new Mac customer. If you find you can be more profitable by shrinking or growing more slowly, fine, but that's not the approach most businesses are seeking to take.
Where people cite "business economics" for abandoning profitable products on a growing platform, dislike or distrust of the platform usually ends up being a more believable explanation.
This is absurd. None of your customers are going to buy $200 Windows licenses, and spend the considerable extra money for Windows support costs, to run your product. They will spend the money to switch to a competitor's product instead. If they wanted to run Windows boxes, they would have them. The fact that they've paid for Macs means they want to run Mac OS, not Windows.
Therefore, the real effect of your decision will be that you will lose your Mac customers. If you have enough Mac customers that your Mac software is a profitable product, you are going to lose money from your decision. If you didn't have that many Mac customers, you shouldn't have been making a Mac product anyway.
If management at your company has this little basic business sense, I'm glad I'm not relying on your product to operate my business.
Oh, come on. Stop throwing a tantrum. No, the GMA950 is not ideal, and it certainly can't compete with the X1600 in the MacBook Pro, but it's proven to be far from a disaster in the Mac mini when working with the Core Duo. The combination of GMA950 and Core Duo will stomp any G3 or G4 iBook in any task but 3D gaming, where it will be roughly an even match. And if you were buying a Mac for 3D gaming, buying an iBook was a stupid thing to do anyway. Upgrade to a MacBook Pro.
For instance... it will play back 1080p H.264 (with a Core Duo), which no G4 iBook will. With 64MB It does spanning with the built-in display and an external display up to 1920x1200, which no iBook could do. It has enough horsepower to enable Core Image-driven special effects such as Dashboard ripples (and presumably whatever new eye candy is in Leopard), which the ATI Mobility units did not. Subjectively, it's smooth in any 2D tasks -- you can drag around all the windows you like, scroll nice and fast, and display complex layered images without excessive delay.
I'm sick of hearing "OMG INTERGRTAED GRAFIKS SUX0rZ!@!@1!!" I really want to know what everyone is planning to do, that they could ever have done on any low-end machine, that really won't work with a GMA950.
Introducing our new Sony Rootkit Insurance policies...
For the most part I agree completely... especially since most Sony components are not nearly as good now as they were in the '90s.
There is an exception, though, and it's what keeps me from going totally Sony-free after the r00tk1t episode. Their S-Master Pro digital amplifiers in the higher-end ES receivers (I have the 5000ES, which was replaced by the linked model) are genuinely terrific when playing digital sources. Astonishing imaging, cool and light, and enough power. To my ears the S-Master Pros don't just compete with the big boys' "budget" stuff -- they compete with high-end products costing several times what they do.
Of course, that just means someone at Sony screwed up. I'm sure the next model will be the usual crap... better buy another 7100ES now, before they rectify the oversight. :p
That's exactly the point.
Current trucks aren't optimized at all for their intended purpose. They waste enormous amounts of energy with their high-horsepower engines coupled to too-tall gearing lugging around big ladder frames that are too heavy for the loads they carry and make good packaging impossible. The *only* task a current large pickup truck is truly optimized for is towing an enormous fifth-wheel trailer on the highway. The reason they are the way they are is because they're cheap to make in huge quantities and buyers don't know about better alternatives.
95% of U.S. truck and van drivers would be better served with different designs. For those carrying bulky cargo in the city (delivery people, repairmen), unibodies with high cubic capacity, small turbodiesels and short gearing would enhance carrying capacity, quickness, maneuverability and fuel economy with no significant tradeoff. Those working off paved roads in the country should have smaller, higher ladder frames with a torquier engine hooked to a real transmission/transfer case, for better off-road ability. And those towing trailers short of 15k lbs. should have trucks sized more appropriately for the job at hand, which would allow for better fuel economy and maneuverability (important for boat towers!)
As for your "lifestyle" logic, I don't think it's really difficult to distinguish between those things we believe society should provide its members (clean air, safe streets, emergency rooms) and those the members need to pay for themselves (the ability to tow huge boats). If you work hard enough you can turn every debate into a slippery slope. That doesn't make all debates worthless.
Get two things, coward:
1. a reasonable boat -- if your boat is over 5000 lbs, you have it just to show off how rich you are.
2. some driving skill -- there are lots of safe vehicles with heavy/long trailers on our roads; they're called semis.
Anyway, a giant V8 truck that can't be parked anywhere, drives like a drunken elephant and gets 12 mpg is hardly a "decent vehicle." I'll keep my Acura TSX, thank you.
This is true only because we're stuck in the Stone Age of trucks in the U.S., thanks to undemanding consumers and truck makers who'd, logically, rather make fat profits than innovate.
Everywhere else in the world, there are high-cube vans powered by small, extremely torquey turbodiesels that carry considerably more stuff than our vans and pickups.
With their short gearing, those vans are plenty quick at lower speeds. And they get more than twice the mileage of our trucks. The only two things they are missing that our trucks have are the ability to tow very heavy trailers and the 100mph top speeds.
Dodge is selling such a Mercedes van in the U.S. as the Sprinter, but it's only one product -- not a full line -- and it needs European-style gas prices to be fully cost-competitive for most markets.
What about large families that need large vehicles? ... How about someone who owns a boat and needs to tow it to a lake, so he needs a big V-8 or V-10? Should these people "feel the pain" when despite owning gas guzzlers, are driving vehicles they need?
Yes. Those are lifestyle choices. People should pay the costs of their lifestyle choices, not force the rest of us to pay them through artificially low gas prices that don't reflect the costs of maintaining a road network or fixing the environmental damage created by large, fuel-hogging vehicles.
Incidentally, you don't need a big V8 or V10 truck to tow most boats that most people own. Something like a V6 Toyota Tacoma will do just fine with all but the huge-ass, over-the-top showoff-craft.
Uhh... no.
Before I sold my 12" 1.5GHz PB last week I did substantial side-by-side testing of the 12", my 2.16GHz MBP, and my dual 1.8 G5 tower. All have enough RAM that swapping wasn't a factor. Keep in mind Rosetta is very RAM-hungry.
Essentially, the results boiled down to the following:
-For native operations without vector processing, the MBP was between 10-60% faster than the dual G5 and between 2.5-4x faster than the PB.
-For native operations with vector processing such that AltiVec could be expected to be doing most of the work on the PPC machines, the MBP was about 20% slower than the dual G5 and nearly 2x faster than the PB.
-In Rosetta, performance varied wildly (presumably depending on the complexity of the code and the number of native functions it calls). But it was faster than the PB at least as often as it was slower, and it was sometimes as much as 30%-40% faster. Certain operations such as opening very complex PDFs in Acrobat 6 were substantially slower, but these were the exception. Rosetta performance was never faster than the dual G5 (duh).
The MBP is hotter than my 1.5GHz 12" was. Just how much hotter depends more on ambient temperature than CPU load. In a cool 65 room or outside, it gets slightly warm to the touch. In 80 or hotter conditions, it gets pretty hot (but still not untouchable), especially underneath and at the metal strip immediately above the keyboard. But even at its worst it's cooler than an 867MHz 12".
I think Apple still has a way to go on power optimization with the MBP. I get about 3 hours no matter what I'm doing -- whether testing in Cinebench or writing /. posts. The machine is almost totally unwilling to shut down the HD. The only thing that makes a difference is lowering screen brightness. It's not like the 12" where I could stretch the battery to nearly 5 hours by launching all my apps and opening all my documents with the power connected so the HD would never spin up.
I loved my 12", but eventually I just couldn't take the 1024x768 postage stamp. And the MBP in this 'roided configuration is much, much faster.
I wasn't aware of these. Viewsonic's best has .20 mm dot pitch, which will *nearly* accommodate 2048x1536. Despite extensive Google searching I can't find anything smaller, including SGI whose lone remaining CRT has .25 mm dot pitch. I'd be curious to see data for specific models.
Electron guns are for the most part dead-on accurate (with given variances for electromagnetic fields not generated by the monitor)
Boats for the most part never leak (with given variances for the condition of the rubber in the gaskets)... Before LCDs were commonly available I used top-quality CRTs everyday. Even then, when 1280x1024 was bleeding-edge, there was always too much electromagnetic noise around to get a picture entirely free from distortion. A CRT hooked to a UPS, with the computer and the electrical system in a Faraday cage, might not be distorted at high resolution. In the real world, they are, usually with very minor but distracting curves in both vertical and horizontal lines.
BTW - try doing relevant measurements in any photoshop-esque program or such using inches instead of pixels as your measurement. Across LCD screens, you're about to see a MASSIVE variance due the overly large size of pixels on LCDs.
As a matter of fact, I have two wildly varying LCDs sitting in front of me right now, driven by the same Power Mac G5: an Apple 23" Cinema with .25 mm dot pitch, and a Samsung 193p with .29 dot pitch. I find it rather useful to be able to change scale, without losing LCD text sharpness, just by moving a window from one monitor to the other. Most programs capable of working in both inches and pixels allow you to adjust the onscreen dpi setting. Mine are set to 100 dpi, which is nearly perfect dimensionally on the Cinema Display, and allows me to see detail a little more precisely on the Samsung.
If you can point me in the direction of a real CRT, which I can test with my real G5, that will display 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 (for HDTV viewing), give me text as sharp as either of my LCDs, and weigh a reasonable amount, I'd be very interested. So far, I haven't seen or used that product, and I'm skeptical because of the practical difficulties inherent in VGA connections and CRTs in a room chock-full of noisy electronics.
That's the point.
You can't see the edges of the pixels on your CRT because the CRT is blurry.
Assuming your 21" monitor is a 4:3 monitor, and (typically for 21" CRTs) that the diagonal of its viewable area is 19.7", the linear size of one pixel at 2048x1536 is roughly 0.195 mm. I have never seen a CRT with a dot pitch under .22 mm, and most are between .25 and .28. Your CRT is *not physically capable* of displaying all the pixels your video card is sending it.
Even if it were, a VGA cable/connector (or the analog part of a DVI one) is not capable of handling such a high-resolution signal gracefully. You are suffering further fuzziness because of interference between lines.
The fact that you can see the edges of pixels clearly is a sign a monitor is sharp. If you are uncritical, text and shapes may look better on a blurry CRT because the letter edges appear less jaggy, but for me the sharp edges cause much less eyestrain, especially with small, non-antialiased text.
Furthermore, some LCDs have smaller dot pitch than any CRT. The 1920x1080 15.4" LCDs sold by a variety of laptop makers have a .177 mm dot pitch. Some specialty monitors have had even smaller pixels.
I'm not going to deny CRTs have advantages, especially for gamers and color professionals. But they're just too damn blurry for working with text all day. And they have this nasty habit of weighing 100 lbs. :-)
23" Apple Cinema Display: Depth: 7.3 inches (not counting stand: 1.5 inches); Weight: 15.5 pounds
Sony GDM-FW900 22.5" CRT: Depth: 10.6 inches; Weight: 92.6 pounds
Depth and weight. My current computer table, with all the music equipment I have on it, would not support an extra 77 pounds of monitor. Neither would my back, when I feel like reconfiguring things.
There's also the sharpness advantage of LCDs. The very best CRTs aren't too bad, but at the highest resolutions they all run into issues with pixels being smaller than the dot pitch. At that point there's absolutely no way text or images can be sharp.
750 (hard drive manufacturer GB) = 698.49 (real GB or GiB, depending on how anal you are).
As these sizes keep getting bigger the need to settle on one method of calculating GB, for both OSes and hard drive manufacturers, keeps getting painfully clearer.
As a longtime Mac user/community member, I can tell you this is not a big deal. The stories would have been *much* bigger if this were affecting any significant portion of users. Apple will, in its usual fashion, wait for the stories to blow over (which they will quickly) and then (too) quietly fix the problem.
I expect most users with problems simply overwrote their OS X partition with Windows. (The Windows XP installer doesn't make it at all clear which is which if they are roughly the same size. Apple users tend to be too cavalier to RTFM.)
Of the rest, most had probably run "the hack" or had custom partitioning schemes which they failed to ditch before installing Boot Camp. All this is covered in the FAQ.
I'm sure a small minority are having real, unexplained problems. But that's true with every piece of software ever released.
FWIW, Boot Camp installed and runs perfectly on my MBP. Fastest Windows machine I've ever used. :-|
I'm always clicking when I don't want to, closing windows, scrolling, selecting, etc. by accident. Tap-to-click probably cuts my productivity in half (no joke).
That said, a two-finger tap might be an OK right click if I could avoid also turning on the one-finger tap.
Still, after this long using Macs, Ctrl-click feels as natural as breathing. Now that I can do it with Apple Mouse Utility in Windows on my MBP I'm perfectly happy.
I actually agree completely with this statement, but I want to also stick up for the users who, like me (I'm a student, and my time is not as easily monetarizable), just like OS X.
People should free themselves from the idea that, if they can't justify their preferences economically, the preferences are somehow "wrong." I buy Macs, spending a little more to do so, because I like them, both for their appealing hardware design and the intuitiveness and stability of OS X. I don't do anything (well, except run Logic Pro) that I couldn't do somehow in Windows. But I'm happy to pay for a more pleasant experience.
What Apple ships isn't the problem, unless you're a hardcore gamer.
The problem is the lack of upgrade options.
For general-use systems, the Mobility X1600 and the 7800GT are perfectly current, and they'll run games OK (just not at 14020x9768 at 2000fps).
But my year-old G5 is stuck with a 64MB 9600XT... and *no way to upgrade!* No one is stocking the absurdly overpriced X800XT Mac Edition and there are no other options. Sigh. I hope the Intel towers will be able to use normal PC video cards.
Yeah, a PowerBook/MBP docking station would be nice, and I don't know why Apple hasn't made one (ExpressCard could handle it). But that's not the solution for everyone -- I have a tower with faster hard drives and 2 big monitors at home, so I don't dock. I use my DVI connector on the road to connect to monitors and projectors at remote sites, and VGA wouldn't always cut it.
I also like the trackpoint and wish it were available as an Apple option. I disagree with your characterization of the keyboards, though -- I find I'm faster with the Apple PB/MBP keyboards than the ThinkPad one. (If you're thinking of the flimsy iBook keyboard it's a different story.)
The other thing which the ThinkPads (and 99% of all other non-Apple laptops) is lacking is digital audio output. This is especially glaring as laptop analog audio hardware is both cheap and very prone to interference from inside the case.
By the way: stealth fighter = 1982. :-) Seriously, I'd love to buy other Core Duo laptops but I haven't seen one with a design even half as sleek and well-executed as Apple's -- and the MBP is only a slight evolution of a design first unveiled in 2003! Laptop manufacturers need to get with the design program. Garish multicolored plastic 1.5" thick enclosures aren't good enough.
Thinkpads are well-built... near indestructible, actually, and from what I've seen that hasn't changed since the Lenovo takeover. But they...
I will say in spite of all that I find them very pleasant to use (other than the unfortunate fact they're usually running Windows).
To get back on topic... I bought a W8610 MBP (2.16, 2GB, 7200). After using it for awhile I can hear the processor noise. But I can only surmise some units must be much, much louder than mine to cause the reactions we've seen all over the net. My dual 1.8 G5 chirp is much, much louder. Even if the G5 fan is running in the same room I can't hear the MBP. And, even in a totally quiet room, it's not bothersome at all. Certainly not worth returning a unit with no dead pixels or apparent other issues to "fix."
And the machine is fast. It stomps my G5 in anything interface- or video-related and is roughly the same in most CPU-bound operations. I'm ecstatic with that level of performance in a 5.5 lb 1" thick gorgeous laptop. Now if I could only add 4GB RAM.
My dual G5, which runs Classic apps faster than any OS 9 Mac, might be inclined to disagree with you. "Classic won't exist anymore" when the first version of Intel-only OS X comes out, which will be no earlier than 10.6 -- presumably not before 2009. Until then, PPC Macs will be easily available and run a current OS. I'd rather Apple focus on the Next Big Thing than waste its time allowing me to run nine-year-old software on a new processor architecture. If I need to run obsolete software by then I'll keep the G5 in a closet and run it over VNC.
My experience has also been that Classic is very compatible. In fact, a lot of old apps that broke on the later OS 9-capable hardware run fine on Classic. That's not to say it's not an ugly kludge, but it's a pretty comprehensive one. The only apps I've found that broke either 1) are so old they expect a 512x342 screen or 2) use undocumented methods to directly access hardware. Comparable Win16 apps wouldn't run in today's Windows either.
Still, saying Windows is "slow" because of legacy cruft is bizarre. Windows is big and fragile, not slow, because of legacy cruft. Contrasting Windows with OS X in this respect is stranger, as OS X's most glaring non-3D-related weakness is really slow small-file I/O performance.
Huh?
How does the notorious fragility and flakiness of Windows PCs have anything to do with DRM? They were that way when DRM was still a twinkle in the *AA's eye. If you had completely DRM-free media streaming from a Windows server you'd still have the same issues.
The general point is on target, though... non-geeks don't want to futz around with a computer just to watch a show. A living-room streaming device will ONLY work when you just hit a button on the remote and it works now, without lag and without the possibility of failure. Even iTunes streaming users, who have to navigate a complicated interface to get their tracks and who deal with occasional stability issues, know we're not there yet.