Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler OFF TOPIC - Who owns an Apple macintosh too?

Does it count if I covet OSX but am still a windows/linux guy?

jr

Everybody's got to start somewhere, James.

I've got an old PM 4400/200 sitting in my closet...

I use a MessagePad 130 on a near daily basis (technically not a Mac, but still an Apple product). I wouldnt be supprised if it died sometime soon however, its been acting kinda funky for the last year or so (turning itself on at random, flickery backlight, occationally gets the pen position WAY wrong, ect).

So I am standing here on the shore, watching my thread be swept slowly out to sea. Aloha mac thread, goodbye forever. Sigh....

I've been die hard mac user since I was a graphic design student. I had a g-4 400mhz but now I got a new G-5 dual 1.8 with a 20" cinema display. Since it has the optical outputs, I can send audio to my HK and get my Axioms to push Mac sound - once you go Mac, you never go back!

Bless you for saving the thread Steve. I lust for a G5, but the 17' flat panel "lamp" I have is doing so well, I just can't force myself to throw more money into a bigger toy.

Whoa - what a head rush. I don't know what made me say that. Of course I could do a G5 and ..just because. It's a toy, it's bigger. I must have one.

You know Ray, this thread is what prompted the appearance of the Decepticon's logo under my name. I am on the dark side. I grew up with a commodore 64, then 128, then an amiga 1000, then 2000. Then my mom brought home macs... She was a graphic designer for years and is most certainly a mac person. I on the other hand got into coding, and I quickly discovered that coding for mac was a thing to abhor. (I had to end up coding in borland running in softwindows because it just wasn't happening otherwise...) It's true that you didn't encounter ".dll hell" that can arise on pcs, but instead you used to have conflicting extensions half the time you installed new software. I like them, don't get me wrong, and OSX/Jaguar are great, but it's too late in the game for me to get pulled in. The only things macs have going for them now are the OS and physical designs, although in those two areas they far surpass pc. I did discover something extremely discomforting regarding Jaguar security. You can aparently boot from an install cd, hit two keys at the login screen, and then set the root password to be whatever you want. Not at all acceptable if you have sensitive material on your computer....

They made some serious marketing mistakes early on, which now amount to the hardware lagging behind similarly priced pc hardware. The claim that the g5 is the fastest pc on earth is completely false (any reasonable system costing ~$1k less built around amd's 64 bit processor will beat it on all but two or three benchmarks, I'll find the articles for the non-believers if desired.) So...I guess what I'm saying is that for economic high end performance, mac is not a feasible option. (This is what I personally look for in a computer.) Granted the pc systems that compare are not as readily available, and one might even have to buy the parts and build the thing themselves, but all assembling a computer amounts to is an expensive jigsaw puzzle. Anyone capable of configuring a $5k home stereo system and tuning it properly could easily assemble a computer with information readily available on the internet.

For useability and stability, mac wins hands down, no contest. In fact I worked at microsoft for a short while on the upcoming version of windows ("Longhorn"), and they had macs set up in numerous places throughout the windows buildings and encouraged programmers to see how various aspects of the mac OS worked...

I will point out that the walk up and change password thing is a moot point. Without physical security, you have NO security. I tell this to my clients all the time. If I can get your drive out of a machine (and it's not encrypted), I can get the data off of it. Now, you can also encrypt data on an OS X machine, and that password (to unencrypt the data) cannot be changed from a boot CD.

OK, that's if you trust OS X not to nuke your encrypted data. I'm pretty sure they fixed that bit...

I'd love to see pricing on the parts for a dual Athlon 64 (or whatever they're calling it--I can't keep up!) for $2K. With a SATA drive, 8 slots of DDR400 (dual channel), PCI-X or Extreme (your choice, I don't care), gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 400 & 800, DVD-RW drive, Radeon 9600 equivalent (yeah, I know, Apple's is a pathetic 64 MB card.) Oh, and a really nice case with fairly quiet cooling. I haven't priced it out; I don't know. Hey, I'd love to know how to do it!

But on dual-proc aware stuff, I would wager that a dual proc G5 is faster than a single proc Athlon 64. I don't know about dual vs. dual. It would not surprise me if the Athlon 64 was faster in some areas, and the G5 faster in others.

Damn, I said I wasn't going to get into this.

Oooh Commodore! I had a Vic20. Oh the happy memories of playing snackman (pacman) on a little 13in b/w tv.

jr

Agreed that without physical security you have no security, but the speed with which someone can compromise your system is still rather frightening. It's one thing to rip out a drive, you're going to clearly notice the thing is missing.

But if someone comes in and installs malicious software on your machine without your knowledge, you might end up far more screwed. I mean in a corporate setting, the user of the machine often doesn't know the root password anyway, some sys. admin sets up the machine and gives them a login. They may never realize anything has happened.

I should add here, you can do something similar on a windows machine by installing windows over top of the existing installation. But again, it takes considerably longer than the mac trick... In which case if you want to be safe, you need to set a bios password and make sure that your bios is not set to boot from cd.