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 Forum index » Instruments and Equipment » OSX as a music workstation
mac vs pc
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Kassen
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 13, 2007 6:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

EdisonRex wrote:

Or, wait! I could draw a matrix of how fast my learning curve works. Or, how long my machine stays running. Or, how many times I have to reboot after an upgrade (ok, this is about even, they all suck at this).


Aside from hardware updates (it seems kinda obvious that swapping out hardware like the CPU will require a power-down and matched re-boot for non-OS reasons) and upgrading the kernel itself I don't see why rebooting would be necessary at all. I don't think "they all suck at this". Windows sucks at this and needs up to three reboots for trivial matters. I've seen OSX needing to reboot at seemingly trivial installs as well (plug&reboot != plug&play, especilly for USB devices), Linux will keep running.

In my experience OSX needs to post-crash reboot at matters like inserting a CD¹, and Windows will need a reboot at any change that a lawyer could argue is "OS related " or if you are masochist enough to put it online (that will equal multiple-reboots per day).

Linux needs to reboot if you want to change your power-supply, hopefully there will be a fix for this soon.


¹yes, you use CD's with OSX "all the time", I don't think I've EVER seen OSX handle the insertion of a cd properly amongst the dozens of times I have inserted CD's into Mac's or seen other people (mainly mac-fanatics) inserting CD's into mac's. I'll believe it when I see it, if ever, maybe all of those times were unusual accidents, feel free to come to The Hague and show me. PM me for my address and number, online movies don't count, I want to see it for myself. Mind you; this is not a deal-breaking issue like the 3gig footprint is, I rarely use CD's at all, I just think it's funny, considering that it's 2007 and all.

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dewdrop_world



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PostPosted: Sat Oct 13, 2007 7:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Kassen wrote:
yes, you use CD's with OSX "all the time", I don't think I've EVER seen OSX handle the insertion of a cd properly amongst the dozens of times I have inserted CD's into Mac's or seen other people (mainly mac-fanatics) inserting CD's into mac's. I'll believe it when I see it, if ever, maybe all of those times were unusual accidents, feel free to come to The Hague and show me. PM me for my address and number, online movies don't count, I want to see it for myself. Mind you; this is not a deal-breaking issue like the 3gig footprint is, I rarely use CD's at all, I just think it's funny, considering that it's 2007 and all.


I can make you a video if you like. I mean, a video of me putting one cd after another into the machine, then showing the screen so you can see the response. (Murphy's law would dictate, though, that something that has worked for me hundreds of times in the past would fail as soon as I commit to a project like that!)

James

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bachus



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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 5:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Blue Hell wrote:
Don't know about C#, it compiles way to slow for my taste.


Productivity is what I want in a language--that and "stability" of the vendor. After being badly burned when Lucid went belly up I went to the dark side and walking over the shattered remains of my principles I embraced M$. BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA Twisted Evil

As a friend expressed it: "It is better to be a surf of the winning Feudal lord than a surf of a losing one.

As for C# it is clearly more productive than C++ and less than Common Lisp. C# feels like a somewhat ad hoc kludge but I think that's true of most "evolved" languages including Java and "modern" C.

I think I can be happy with C# till something better comes along. As they say It is better to light one up than curse the darkness.

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blue hell
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 5:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

bachus wrote:
As they say It is better to light one up than curse the darkness.


Sure, I'll stick though with my old candles & matches for a while (now if only it won't start raining ... please ... Laughing )

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mosc
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 7:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

dewdrop_world wrote:

My office issued me a Dell Win2k laptop. It's OK. I avoid browsing suspicious sites, don't open crap emails and don't install any junk widgets or toolbars and it's reasonably stable. It is not fast. Boot time can be up to 3-5 minutes (my Macbook Pro takes about 30-40 seconds)... then, the duration from the time I login to the time I can actually read my new emails in Outlook is another 2-3 minutes. (Apple Mail launches in less than 5 seconds usually, maybe 10 after reboot when the filesystem cache is empty.)

Then there is the Windows mechanism to check for updates, which clogs the CPU at 100% for several minutes at a time, 3-5 times every day. In-frickin-sane. Remember, kiddies, in Windows land, this is a FEATURE. We will cripple your machine 20 times every week just to check for updates and you should be thankful for it.

Talk about a system not suitable for realtime applications. I don't have invective strong enough to address this adequately.

So if this is what is called "pcs are fast," I have to conclude the initial writer is either not paying attention or certifiably insane. I don't want to drink any of that kool-aid at home, thank you very much.


James, you can't really judge the performance of any OS by using a laptop supplied by the IT department at a company. I used to run an IT department and there is more shit that is loaded on end-user computers than you would ever want to hear about. The multiple checks are certainly checks to your local IT servers.

Also, Dell PCs and laptops aren't where people go when they want the best bang for the buck. Companies like them because of the support they give the IT departments, and the prices they can negotiate.

I'm not trying to defend Microsoft (or Apple) but company computers are often really messed up.

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Last edited by mosc on Sun Oct 14, 2007 8:11 am; edited 1 time in total
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mosc
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 8:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Kassen wrote:
In my experience OSX needs to post-crash reboot at matters like inserting a CD¹, and Windows will need a reboot at any change that a lawyer could argue is "OS related " or if you are masochist enough to put it online (that will equal multiple-reboots per day).


Not that I'm defending Apple (or Microsoft) but something is weird here. I have a Mac and I've never had any problems with inserting or ejecting CDs.

My Mac gets updates from Apple more frequently than XP and every one requires a reboot with chkdsk. Most of the updates seem to be for iTunes and QT. Why these require a reboot is beyond me. Apple updates my XP machine for iTunes and QT frequently also, and it requires a reboot for that too. I've never seen a MS update that didn't require a reboot either.

In any case, you can choose to turn off auto updates if you want, on either OS.

BTW, Kassen. I'm keep my XP computers on line all the time through a little Dlink router/firewall. I've never had a problem. When I'm recording live music, I generally turn off the network - easy in XP or OSX - unless I'm streaming, of course.

You are right about Linux. Usually, our servers stay up for about 1 year. The server we are on now has never been rebooted since we got it. Even the great crash of 2007 was caused by human error, not Linux. Unix machines don't seem to need defrag either.

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Kassen
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 9:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Clearly I've seen bad examples, but yes, I realised last night that I simply can't remember a time when a Mac reacted properly to CD's. back in the OS8 days I saw the same sort of thing with floppies and those could cause some truly outrageous errors as well. Errors that would flat-out contradict themselves. We wanted to take screenshots of those for fun but back then MacOS couldn't even take screenshots while also displaying error messages as there was no multi-tasking.

At least floppies don't auto-mount. I know you can probably turn the auto-mounting off but you only realise the owner hasn't done so *after* everything has become stuck. Oh, well, like I said it's not a major issue for me, I use memory cards a lot more, In fact I took the CD drive out of my own laptop to save weight and heat, same for the battery. Laptop batteries seem dangerous things these days anyway.

I should say that XP has similar issues. Formatting a floppy, for example, makes the whole thing noticeably slow, back with Win98 you could hardly do anything while formatting a floppy. This is strange to me as floppies have their own controllers and it's not like it takes a lot of CPU. With OS/2 on a pentium1 75MHz you could tell it to format a floppy, then go play a game while it worked and still get good frame-rates. I don't understand why OSX and XP want to auto-mount and auto-run everything all the time, BTW. Just because I insert a memory card doesn't mean it's safe to assume I want to do something with it right now or that it needs to be opened as a folder, maybe I just want it to be there so it's not lying around like a stray object.


Linux's uptime it truly a marvel, I'm amazed every time that I can upgrade the whole system, including the graphical server, and it will restart itself without me even noticing it. Just a few days ago I updated the SSH shell and it notified me that it might need to re-start but that if I would be connected by it the connection would be preserved. To me that's a very amazing thing, I find it hard to understand those things are even possible at all. Rebooting just to install a media player seems like something from the dark-ages compared to that, even DOS didn't need to reboot at such things.

I never thought I'd say this but compared to XP and OSX DOS is starting to look quite advanced, in retrospect. Back in the DOS days people would connect a CD player while the computer was running, then install a floppy disk driver while it ran and it would work.

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Kassen
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 9:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

mosc wrote:

BTW, Kassen. I'm keep my XP computers on line all the time through a little Dlink router/firewall. I've never had a problem. When I'm recording live music, I generally turn off the network - easy in XP or OSX - unless I'm streaming, of course.


Yes, with a good external firewall and only opening files from trusted sources it can be ok. I never found a easy way to truly turn off networking, networking is managed by a LOT of little programs that are all through the system. After I disabled the network and modem in the device manager and BIOS I *still* found processes that turned out to be related to networking running. If you have a easy way to truly close it down I'd love to hear it.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 12:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I don't have our Mac handy, but on XP just go to control panel, network connections, select a network connection and click disable. There will still be processes loaded but they won't interrupt stuff too much. It's been enough for me to be happy with.

On XP, automatic updates can be controlled by control panel, system. Automatic Updates.

On both OSX and XP you can stop and start the network without rebooting.

Interesting about the batteries. Juli is a teacher and they bought a Mac G4 PowerBook for every teacher in the school district, but they aren't allowed to use the batteries - a safety hazard.

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v-un-v
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 12:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

mosc wrote:

Interesting about the batteries. Juli is a teacher and they bought a Mac G4 PowerBook for every teacher in the school district, but they aren't allowed to use the batteries - a safety hazard.


That's absurd and above all, preposterous. It's the kind of stupid rule they'd dream up in this country. Yes. There IS a 1 in 80,000 chance of an explosion, so lets ban it so we'll never be that '1'.

Twisted Evil

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Kassen
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 1:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Yes, I agree a ban is exaggerated, but I tend to leave computers running while on small errants, I also stress-test my own code by leaving it running for a long time and seeing what happens and I noticed the machine doesn't get nearly as hot without the battery and DVD-rom. I feel better that way, it also saves about a third of the weight so to me that's a good trade. I set the CPU to never step down in speed, that's good for music but it makes it impossible to use it on the battery for any serious amount of time anyway, I don't care that much, at least I get some reading done on trains that way :¬).
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 14, 2007 3:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I came home and my Ubuntu machine had rebooted itself. Apparently it can't manage the thermal profile or something, so the machine shuts itself down once in awhile. I haven't actually figured this out.

So I stick to "they all suck sometimes". I use all of these operating systems, and in the same room too. I find things to bitch about all of them. Linux sucks at power management, especially on laptops, even more especially on Sony laptops. Ok, fair enough, Sony laptops are as closed source a hardware platform as you can wish for (the poor sonypi.so module is a sad mess best left unlinked) but I've been impressed that some distros do almost a good job with it. Ubuntu had been managing my laptop pretty well but it still did a matter-over-mind shutdown one day.

/me shrugs.

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