Apple Macs
 

We just got one into the office, a top of the range twin processor G4. Looks absolutely amazing. you have never seen such a lovely machine. Couple of problems with it though.

What's with the mouse thingy ?

what sort of modern computer doesnt have 2 buttons and a scrolly thing ? not good, not good at all. Can I stick a standard usb mouse on it, one with 2 buttons and a scrolly thing and expect it to work without lots of dicking about ?

Also
Dumb arsed printing to a windows printer over a network.

how ?
I've got CUPS working up to a point but for some reason its constantly changing any printers location from the machine it is connected to to the machine that was providing DHCP (now changed) and therefor it dont print. Its a great machine for sure and the linux based OS is a dream but its being a bit of a pig atm

Vaio

Re: Apple Macs
 

Sure, it's great with USB like that.

One-buttoned mice are good but some apps want at least two; it's not a question of being modern exactly. Some people think one is best, some think five is best, it's largely tradition and taste either way. I prefer user interfaces optimised for one button myself. Think Different! (how patronising is that advert?)

Re: Re: Apple Macs
 

I think I prefer think scrolly thing :)

Vaio

and I cant get Samba to work. Piece of crap :p

Vaio

personally, 2 buttons and wheel should be standard on all platforms. One button has just comedy value for me :/

5+ buttons for gaming

mac > pc
although i wish ppl realised this earlier and games were produced mainly for mac along with other software/hardware etc. then the world would have been a much better place :P

mac's arent actually better than PC's but then again PC's arent better than macs. It all depends on what your plannning to do on it.

If your a very 'arty' person who uses alot of paint packages, movie editing software and such like then for you cant beat a Mac as this is what they were primarly designed for.

However a PC is much better when it comes to general usage as its designed to be more diverse. So while it may be slower than a Mac for the movie/paint types applications it will outperform it on everything else.

When it comes to games PC's are just generally a much better platform to use than a Mac due to its diversity although admittedly the PC is let down by teh OS that most of PC's users use which only works adequatly for 2 hour blocks befor eit needs restarted where as MaC OS is a much more stable OS.

The moral to this post is you cant really make sweeping generlisations like "x > y " on subjects like this simply because it depends on your planned usage

Why is it that mac's are better for graphics as opposed to windoze machines?

Re: Apple Macs
 

<pedant>BSD</pedant>

Eh?

That was the funniest thing I've seen all week =/

Well for starters Macs use RISC CPU's instead of the CISC CPU's inside your PC. Basically this means that the intstruction set ina Mac's CPU is alot smaller. Now most people who hear this think "but surely that makes them worse" but in fact all it means is they are more specialised. Added to this the OS has been designed with this in mind and hence has been desigend to be good in the areas that suit the machines architecture

And cos we have a rule about that sort of thing.
If anyone wants Mac vs PC opinions they can go to one of the gazillion sites about it. Arguing the general case is useless. Does anyone know about this CUPS problem?

No idea. Maybe this will help? I don't 'do' Macs :(

It's a very easily summerisable argument.

Macs now have a more unstable OS, for the first time ever.
Macs are more expensive.
Macs are slower.
The only thing about macs that makes them different (the processors) are made by IBM. Hohoho.

I historically used a three button mouse.

Acorns were great, especially at DTP; Impression Publisher Professional was much better than Quark imo, having used both.

A RISC architecture is less specialized. That's essentially what the term means.
I'm not sure what OS you're referring to. Classic Mac OS was designed on the 68xxx family of processors whereas the current Mac OS X has a bsd Unix core. Both were ported to run on the PowerPC architecture.

Re: Apple Macs
 

yes. i dont know how much fannying about, but i know someone who brings their super-uber-kicass logitech into their workplace daily

RISC stands for reduced instruction-set computer. By having less instructions available to the CPU it forces the machine to be more specilized than a CISC processor (complex instruction-set computer)

You can not be more generalized if you only have access to 20% of the instruction calls. It does however allow you to run these intructions much quicker thus masking the chip more specialised for these tasks

until PC makers realised that 'pretty machines' sell. Macs will continue to be bought.

Even their laptops are amazing to look at.

Bought by arts students, anyway.

Apple is a premium brand, end of argument.

That's like saying a bag of Lego bricks is more specialized than a pre-assembled toy.
Sure you can. You assemble sequences of simple instructions to do complicated tasks. That's what programming is, after all, whether your computer has 32 instructions or 304 instructions. The difference is that with only 32 instructions, they all have to be very simple and general purpose. With 304 instructions, you can have some very esoteric and specialized instructions; for example, you can have an instruction to evaluate a polynomial. That instruction is so specialized that you might never use it--but it's there.

Is the RISC computer more specialized because it doesn't have an instruction to evaluate polynomials? Of course not. If you need to evaluate a polynomial on a RISC machine, then you just do it with sequences of simple, general-purpose instructions (LOAD, ADD, MULT, etc).

as tactitus pointed out a smaller instruction set doesn't mean the cpu is more specialized but of course u CAN specialize a cpu by e.g. adding instructions for matrix operations as they do for gfx chips etc.
in micro-programmed cisc processor only about 20% of the instructions are used regularely.

since the compiler is doing the work of breaking down the code onto the isa-layer the basic programmer doesn't have to worry about the differences.

the main differences between cisc and risc are that it is more complicated to develope a cisc cpu, that risc cpus usually have larger registers and that risc cpus usually need 1 cycle/instruction while cisc cpus need a couple more (the itanium is quite close to 1 c/i now tho) and that pipelining technologies don't mix too well with risc technology