"Joy of Use" is why my next machine will be a Mac. (sorry, Linux display routines are too slow--but pretty)

Gah, I can't believe I forgot to post the *link* to the story the first time. Sorry, y'all.

Mark, yeah, Apple does seem to make beauty and elegance an important part of their product. Sometimes I like to walk around in Target and point out all the things that are IMac-inspired in design. But I'm just talking about the outside of the machine; what about computer graphics? If I look at a photograph of a landscape on a screen, I might admire the resolution and the monitor's range of colors, but that's just the medium, not the piece itself. Can anyone recommend any reading on digital aesthetics?

well, of course, that depends on whether you are using a slow machine :) for example, i find that mozilla on linux runs as fast as in w98 (i have a dual boot system, so this is a good comparison because the hardware setup is, of course, equal).

and since studies in the last year have pointed that the cost/performace ratio for mac's is much worse than pc's, it's difficult for me to see where this evaluation would come from.

for example, compare the hardware specs on this 933MHz PowerPC G4 with the Athlon XP 2200+ powered PC price equivalent from Alienware. hardware specs would certainly suggest that the PC is superior in terms of performance (933mhz vs 1800mhz?).

so, even if Linux isn't quite as fast as an OS, you'd have to spend a hell of a lot more to make the hardware equivalent to show off that superior "display routine."

if this is not just part of the apple marketing hype that mac's are superior in performance to pc's, i'd love to see the studies (of course, i've asked you this before--dig :)

charlie

The mac tends to reproduce color more accurately than some platforms. So media/message are slightly overlapping.

clock speed and display speed are not synonymous. I had win2000 on a dell optiplex gx100 PII 450 mhz, and linux on the exact same model, connected wth a belkin monitor/keyboard switch.

The Linux box just felt discernably slower when performing common gui tasks.

the operand here may be "i had." sure, you're talking about a machine which is what, about three years old? those boxes had what, 4 mb vid cards integrated in the motherboard for rendering 2d. slight differences between linux and w2000 would make huge differences. plus, depending on what version of linux you were using, the changes to the os and drivers could be dramatic.

meanwhile, i'm runnning an athlon 1333mhz with 512mb of ram on a 32mb geforce card with redhat 7.2. that's at least two generations different in power and performance. in the hardware/os world, change things rapidly in one year, much less say 3. using that comparison is like saying that netscape/mozilla is greatly inferior to ie in terms of perfomance, which is was about 3 or 4 months ago :)

isn't color reproduction based on vid card and monitor? new macs tend to use ati and geforce cards which are also available for pc's (for example, if you look at the specs on the pc and mac i gave above, the pc seems to have the better titanium geforce card). true, mac's tend to come with more expensive monitors, but these days, most top monitors run on mac and pc. my wife just got a 19" viewsonic, and with the same vid card, it would look the same on mac or pc.

sorry, can't help picking on you, mark, and debunking the mac myth :)

charlie

Hey, I was comparing to identical machines, and linux felt slower on them than windows. Using Redhat 7.6, I think. Just to shut you up (I am smiling as I write that) I will install redhat on my dell 1.4 ghz. Which installation should I download for painless installs? Mandrake 8.x? Redhat?

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=colorsync+windows+xp++group:comp.sys.m...

In terms of digital production and color matching, there seems to be a slight edge to mac. I don't do that work, so it doesn't matter. The important thing, I think, is that we actually got some responses to a story.

i haven't tried mandrake since 8.0, but 7.3 redhat is pretty easy to install. and you get kde 3.0 (which has a few quirks still, given the release version, but i think that i heard that it's faster than some of the kde 2.x series).

Give it a shot. Speed is one thing that hasn't been a problem for me (except when I was using a cat5 patch cable--strangely enough, linux like the cat6 better). Mozilla seems just as snappy to me. And OpenOffice takes forever whether I'm in Windows or Linux. My only complaints are that my digital camera doesn't work with Linux (yet) and no dreamweaver :(

I stand corrected. Although, the impression i got was that it was for high end digital imaging work. I'm wondering if the average user would see much discernable difference in typical computer usage.

"The important thing, I think, is that we actually got some responses to a story." Yeah. You and me arguing :) (I really think you are defending macs because you have no choice. But that's okay.)

Noooooo, I am not a mac bigot. I switched to a Mac because it would be fun and different. I hooked up a brand new PeeCee at work after letting it sit in the box for two weeks, because I knew it wouldn't feel any better than my PII 450mhz Dell. I just want a little pizazz, a little fun, a little better usability and an integrated unix environment.

I think that the color differences don't matter, to be honest.

If I were buying a subnotebook (and I might) I would definitely consider a sony vaio, or maybe a 12-inch ibook. Both are cool, the vaio slightly cooler (i.e. the picturebook).

What it would take to make a PC fun for me:

1. combo dvd burner

2. totally skinnable windows xp pro

3. frightening amounts of bandwidth

4. large lcd studio display

5. real speakers

6. integrated Tivo pvr card

7. about 17 usb ports

8. sheetfeed scanner with abby finereader

9. etc. etc.

It's not the box, it's everything you can use with it, I guess. The box is just a node in a network of peripherals and bits. So I'd be into a PC if I were made of money. At home, definitely. But at work I want something seamless, fun to use, and that will insulate me from answering the support questions of windows users while giving me a server to use for my classes without having to run linux full time as my desktop os.

linux SHOULD feel slower on the same hardware. for god's sakes, the windows machines mostly have their display routines running in kernel mode, where they can pre-empt just about everything else.

all of the linux graphics stuff is running in userland, where its a little bit harder to get speed out of things. the linux stuff has 10x the features and 10x the stability.

the fact that the windows and free-unixy-system graphics are

even remotely equivalent says volumes about the marvel that is the linux / XFree86 code. :)

clock cycle measures on PowerPC and Intel/Athlon chips are not equivalent. in fact, they're rather skewed. that does not do nice things for apple in terms of being able to sell their machines as "speed demons", even though the better ones are.

the high end of each platform seems to be roughly equivalent. right down to using identical peripherals and memory.

well, not from what i've read.

and i just put together an athlon machine today which, if you put about $300 more into, would be the technical equivalent of the g4 mentioned above.

oh, i know that :) i was just suggesting that maybe your affinity for macs is growing since you are moving to a mac heavy department? seem to remember you mentioning something about that. maybe i was wrong.

but don't blame you for not wanting to answer windows support questions. but i think i'll go the linux route.

and i understand about the pc/usability thing. i just built 14 machines with w98 and i advised that we build them with 98 because xp just doesn't seem to offer much more to the basic wordprocessing/email/internet office work. just seems to eat up more processor/memory.

charlie