[mshan]

I am just kinda of guessing about the Adobe (Main Concept) MPEG-2 encoders.

They looked pretty good projected on an 8 ft screen with an Infocus 4805, so if the Apple encoders are just as good, that is comforting.

Are render times on these new Intel iMacs about the equivalent of real time? (i.e. 1 hour dvd takes 1 hr to encode?)

 

[ManMower]

What do you mean by optimized?

OSX is probably the slowest operating system on the planet, and scales very poorly to multiple processors.

That's not to say an app can't run fast as long as it avoids system calls, or that a carefully written app won't scale well. I think the Apple users will agree that OSX is "optimized for usability".

Apple early adopters are a little more likely to get the buggy products, so if you can hold off a while you might save yourself some headaches.

 

[TheSloth]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ManMower OSX is probably the slowest operating system on the planet, and scales very poorly to multiple processors.

That is possibly the most misleading statement I have ever read on head-fi. I'm not going to debate it here, because it's unrelated to the original topic.

If you wish to discuss this in detail, PM me.

 

[ManMower]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheSloth That is possibly the most misleading statement I have ever read on head-fi. I'm not going to debate it here, because it's unrelated to the original topic. If you wish to discuss this in detail, PM me.

I'll send you that PM, but let me try to extract my foot from my mouth here first:

Do not concern yourself too much with the "speed" of your operating system.

Especially with something like video compressing, the application is where the speed comes from. (ie: stay away from rosetta)

People that like OSX like it for the interface, integration - the usability. This isn't something that gets cpu related tweaks, so for a video editing workstation, I doubt very much that there's much reason to wait for 10.5.


wrt word processing:
You can read a .doc file or create text files with stuff that comes with the OS. If you need to create .doc files that look the same on a windows machine then you'll have to buy MS Word (as you would under windows) which I believe isn't yet available as a universal binary.

Open Office (free) and Pages (part of iWork, not too expensive) do not, in my experience, make .doc files that look the same on both platforms.

They're both just dandy for typing letters though.

 

[mshan]

Can I import, open, and edit files created in Microsoft Word (Windows XP machine) on the new iMacs?

 

[plus_c]

Yes, as long as you get the Mac version of MS Office. The only Office compatibility problems I've run into have been with PowerPoint.

Oh, and to the poster who said OpenOffice is equivalent to MS Office: you are SO far wrong that it's not even funny. I'm not a fan of MS either, this is why I use a Mac. But Excel can do things for financial and statistical analysis that OpenOffice could never DREAM of. Call me again when OpenOffice comes with a version of Solver that's as good as Microsoft, and we can have this debate again. Until then, whether I like it or not, I'll be an MS Office user.

 

[Malus]

I think it is just as optimized as it would be on the PowerPC architecture. Unless they are *heavily* patching GCC, I would think that the performance would be similar, if not better, on the x86 platform, since the compiler probably performs most of the optimizations.

The kernel on MacOSX (XNU) is a blend of the Mach kernel and the FreeBSD kernel. Microkernels (like the Mach kernel) tend to be slower than monolithic kernels due to the overhead of communication between the different parts of the microkernel (since some parts are in the userland while others aren't). However, the XNU kernel utilizes the best of both worlds for its implementation and shouldn't be too much slower than a traditional monolithic implementation. It might not be as fast as Linux or FreeBSD (which I use), but I'm sure it certainly trounces Windows in that regard.

Quote:

Oh, and to the poster who said OpenOffice is equivalent to MS Office: you are SO far wrong that it's not even funny. I'm not a fan of MS either, this is why I use a Mac. But Excel can do things for financial and statistical analysis that OpenOffice could never DREAM of. Call me again when OpenOffice comes with a version of Solver that's as good as Microsoft, and we can have this debate again. Until then, whether I like it or not, I'll be an MS Office user.

It's been shown that some parts of Excel (mostly those relating to probability and statistics), do not calculate things correctly (hence the emergence of many third party extensions for these sorts of calculations). I'm not sure how well OpenOffice's spreadsheet works, but it can't be too bad.

Some sources on this:
http://www.practicalstats.com/Pages/excelstats.html
http://www.agresearch.co.nz/Science/.../exceluse1.htm
http://www.daheiser.info/excel/frontpage.html
http://www.mis.coventry.ac.uk/~nhunt/pottel.pdf

 

[davei]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mshan Can I import, open, and edit files created in Microsoft Word (Windows XP machine) on the new iMacs?

Yup, I do it all the time. Alternate between Office 2003 on XP and Office 2004 on Mac.

 

[TheSloth]

TextEdit, the free and simple text editor that comes with the OS can open most simple MS Word documents. I'm not sure what level of complexity it can handle with respect to images, graphs etc., but it can certainly open simple files.