[BigFNDeal]

I am currently using three of the choices above...

My Desktop is Vista Ultimate 32bit, my laptop is Windows XP Pro, I have a media server running Windows 2000Pro and an email box (which is really an old Dell c840 laptop in a dock) running Ubuntu 7.04. The email machine is extremely slow right now, so that may be shifting back to DSL-N soon.

Most of my computer based listening takes place on the Vista Ultimate 32-bit machine, just in case anyone wants to flame me for it!

 

[BigFNDeal]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gatticus /img/forum/go_quote.gif What is 'Core audio'? You can make a PC as quiet or noisy as you like if you know what you are doing. My main PC is almost inaudible when I turn it on. Only time it becomes a bit noisier is when I play 3D games because the video card is smart enough to turn the fan up to a higher speed when gaming and lower for when not gaming.

I am still very confused at the whole silent computer phenomenon. Especially on this website above all others. If you have headphones on, and are listening to music, why do you care what the computer sounds like? Maybe its me, and I did see at the MD/VA meet that I must listen to music way louder than most people, that I couldn't hear what someone standing next to me said when my DT770's are on, let alone what my computer sounds like. I mean to each his own, that's why they created chocolate and vanilla, but just seems to me to be a moot point.

 

[LowPhreak]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ccotenj /img/forum/go_quote.gif gatticus... geez... bit of an attitude, huh?

You noticed that too.

 

[BigFNDeal]

I'm not a mod, but before this turns into a war, let's all chill. As I said earlier, there's enough choices in the world of computers for everyone to be individual. Let's ALL show each other EQUAL respect.

 

[gugi]

mac mini/os x at home
linux (debian & ubuntu) @ work (we designed/built a 48-node diskless beowolf cluster 4 years ago, plus desktops)

my impressions:
1.) as far as user interface goes, OS X is the best out there (no wonder everybody tries to copy them) Their UI designers just know how to make things intuitive and how a human body/mind operates. Unlike anybody else it seems.

2.) apart from that apple's implementation of bsd plain sucks. of course i'm comparing it to linux performancewise, but apple claims it's really stable etc. not my experience - i can hardly get 2 weeks of uptime on my mac mini. apple's response to my bugreports has been 'it's a known bug' and 'our engineers are working exclusively on leopard'. of course there hasn't been a single time i've talked to customer support when they have not suggested that i purchase 'apple care'.

So yes I'm on my second mac mini. I love the user interface and I hate the underlying operating system, apple's greed and their just not carrying about anything but extracting money from their customers.

P.S. I did max the memory of the mini and upgraded to a dvd/rw drive myself and had using a putty knife/creditcard... Clearly not something that the average customer should do, but it's intentionally designed this way.

 

[maarek99]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gugi /img/forum/go_quote.gif mac mini/os x at home linux (debian & ubuntu) @ work (we designed/built a 48-node diskless beowolf cluster 4 years ago, plus desktops) my impressions: 1.) as far as user interface goes, OS X is the best out there (no wonder everybody tries to copy them) Their UI designers just know how to make things intuitive and how a human body/mind operates. Unlike anybody else it seems.

I disagree. Mouse support is bad. They have mouse acceleration enabled always and turning it off is... a bit difficult, if not impossible. Hate it.

 

[thebob]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gatticus /img/forum/go_quote.gif What is 'Core audio'? You can make a PC as quiet or noisy as you like if you know what you are doing. My main PC is almost inaudible when I turn it on. Only time it becomes a bit noisier is when I play 3D games because the video card is smart enough to turn the fan up to a higher speed when gaming and lower for when not gaming.

Apple explains it far better than I can.

<snip>

Mac OS X Core Audio integrates a range of audio functionality directly into the operating system in ways never before possible, enabling unprecedented performance and ease of use in your virtual studio. Core Audio lays a new foundation for the next generation of world-class audio and music applications from innovative developers.

Breathtaking Performance
Mac OS X delivers the best audio performance in desktop computing. The most fundamental measure of audio performance is throughput latency — the time it takes for audio to enter your Mac, travel through the system to your application and then pass back out to your monitoring system (speakers).

The Core Audio HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) allows multiple applications to share the same device, while maintaining ultra-low latency performance. So you could assign channels one through six of a eight-channel output device to a multi-track program, such as Logic Pro 7, while leaving a virtual studio rack like Reason with channels seven and eight.

<snip>

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreaudio/

 

[thebob]

Quote:

Originally Posted by goldenratiophi /img/forum/go_quote.gif Never gonna happen. If OS X ran on anybody's computer, how would Apple sell hardware?

Not only that but it would be a driver nightmare. Trying to support a sqillion venders hardware would detract from the ' it just works' Mac experience.

 

[thebob]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gatticus /img/forum/go_quote.gif What is 'Core audio'? You can make a PC as quiet or noisy as you like if you know what you are doing. My main PC is almost inaudible when I turn it on. Only time it becomes a bit noisier is when I play 3D games because the video card is smart enough to turn the fan up to a higher speed when gaming and lower for when not gaming.

Video cards are an area where Apple really rip you off. Even though they have PCIe slots you have to buy the Mac version of the card, and the venders of high end cards only sell them through the Apple store.

I had just convinced my friend to buy a MacPro because they are very good value compared to high end gaming PC's but the video card was the "got ya"

I know quite a few people who use Mac hardware for Windows only computers, it would be nice to see that on the poll.

 

[thebob]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zanth /img/forum/go_quote.gif Bingo! They are an integrated systems manufacturer/retailer. Mac/OSX, iPod/iTunes, iPhone/OSX They like everything to be pretty well ready to go out of the box using their stuff. "It just works" is perhaps not 100% true but is not far off when comparing other hardware/software combinations in the wild. With the latest news that Apple is now nudging Gateway out of the 3 top hardware manufacturers...and their OSX is creeping ever so slowly into the maintstream corporate space, Apple is now worth just under HP and slowly closing the gap on IBM. Sure much is iPod-related (and inflated with iPhone) but this allows a lot of funds to pump into R&D for new Macs (new iMacs are rumored to be all touch screen by next spring....same with the new laptops). Anyhow, they would increase their complications by a wide margin if they were all things to everyone. This is why MS has problems, and in many ways why Linux has not been widely adopted. Too many distros, too many windows managers, not enough coherency for corporations to throw it out on the desktops.

Amen to that.

There is also a rumour about loads of flash RAM in the new notebooks. Apple have always been about driving technology forward. With OSX.5 imminant and new hard ware on the horizon the future looks bright.

Their policy of going for the top end of the market, and leaving the rest to scrabble over the razor thin profits in the budget end makes great sense.

 

[DarkScorpion]

xp pretty much everywhere....

 

[SK138]

OSX is my preferred platform. I have converted my wife and kid's computers to Linux. They like the fact that it always works. I been in the computer (software) business for over 20 years and I have seen too many Windows issues at work and I don't want to deal with that at home

 

[westies]

Dual booting Vista and Ubuntu. I spend most of my time in Vista since there are no audio drivers for my X-Fi in Linux, my Foobar config in windows, and I do a bit of gaming.

 

[Gatticus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ccotenj geez... bit of an attitude, huh?

When it comes to scammers, you bet. I'm not one of those people that believes in, "don't rock the boat". In fact, I'm quite the opposite. Take it or leave it. My 'tude wasn't directed at you anyway so don't see why you care. It was directed at the likes of Apple Computer Corporation.

 

[Gatticus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BigFNDeal /img/forum/go_quote.gif I am still very confused at the whole silent computer phenomenon. Especially on this website above all others. If you have headphones on, and are listening to music, why do you care what the computer sounds like?

Because I don't always use headphones. I also have a decent little stereo hooked to my computer and my computer is also hooked to an LCD projector. When I want to watch a movie I watch it being streamed to my projector from my PC. I don't wear headphones when I do that so want/need my PC to be as quiet as possible.