Buying a Mac

[Flames0910]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

There's no point in any of this, really.

People who get it, get it. People who don't, don't. The fact that the people who don't think the people who do should also... er... don't... is... err...

Well. You know.

True.

live and let live.

[MickMcGeough]

My windows laptop beats the snot out of my MBP in gaming and most synthetic benchmarks, and it was cheaper than my MBP.

I can get a website done at least 10% faster on my MBP with Textmate, CSSEdit (for which there are no Windows equivalents), ImageAlpha, and SVN-X.

For a 10% increase in work efficiency I'd gladly pay double what Apple sells MPBs for.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

If you really are concerned about saving money, then build a PC and install OSX on it and hook up an Apple keyboard and mouse. If you want it to be as pretty or prettier or any size you want, this can be done with a little elbow grease and all the modding tools and parts out there.

This goes back to something I say all the time on here - those case mods and futzing around with OSx86 are only free if your time has no value.

8 hours of "elbow grease" easily covers/exceeds the premium Apple charges.

For some people however, the DIY pride factor, or simply having lower valued time, means that its viable. Nothing wrong with that.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

This goes back to something I say all the time on here - those case mods and futzing around with OSx86 are only free if your time has no value.

8 hours of "elbow grease" easily covers/exceeds the premium Apple charges.

For some people however, the DIY pride factor, or simply having lower valued time, means that its viable. Nothing wrong with that.

We can't all be high rolling IT ninjas like Mr. Time Is Money you.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

This goes back to something I say all the time on here - those case mods and futzing around with OSx86 are only free if your time has no value.

8 hours of "elbow grease" easily covers/exceeds the premium Apple charges.

For some people however, the DIY pride factor, or simply having lower valued time, means that its viable. Nothing wrong with that.

Exactly. People always forget the "how much is your time worth" aspect of this discussion. For some of us, not having to micro-manage everything is more valuable than a couple hundred more dollars at the till.

It's like my sister who will drive to the other side of the city to save 8 cents per liter on gas. Is the hour and a half in traffic really worth the $3.20 saved on a 40L tank?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Exactly. People always forget the "how much is your time worth" aspect of this discussion. For some of us, not having to micro-manage everything is more valuable than a couple hundred more dollars at the till.

It's like my sister who will drive to the other side of the city to save 8 cents per liter on gas. Is the hour and a half in traffic really worth the $3.20 saved on a 40L tank?

But I would not be happier with the product even if I had spent a few hundred extra dollars at the the till, and it's not just the money part. I wouldn't want a big box stock anything. Apple is now for all intents and purposes the big concrete corporation in their 1984 commercial in my mind as far as aesthetics and design ubiquity goes. This is all personal taste & opinion of course.

I think for a lot of other people, the whole Apple pricing thing is not about inherent value (whatever that means for you whether in time, productivty, security, efficiency, look, etc.) but rather an underlying feeling that Apple is making more money off them then they should be because they are used to other platforms where competition is rife and margins are razor thin (5% whereas Apple's margins are estimated in the 40% area).

A couple years ago, someone tried to convince me to buy an Apple Cinema Display but it was built with the exact same panel as an LG display that was half the price. Yes it had a plastic body instead of fancy aluminum but it looked just as good.

It's not neccessarily an Apple / PC thing. I would similarily never buy a Sony Vaio product for instance for the exact same reasons.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

We can't all be high rolling IT ninjas like Mr. Time Is Money you.

I didn't put a financial number on it on purpose - the point being that if I could buy more time directly, I probably would. But you can only spend time, so it has to be spent wisely.

For some people, spending time modding a case and installing OSx86 is valuable to them, and they invest time in it. For a huge segment of the market though, its not a good investment at all. Mainly because for most people, the computer is a means to an end, not an end in itself like it is for most geeks.

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

This goes back to something I say all the time on here - those case mods and futzing around with OSx86 are only free if your time has no value.

8 hours of "elbow grease" easily covers/exceeds the premium Apple charges.

For some people however, the DIY pride factor, or simply having lower valued time, means that its viable. Nothing wrong with that.

It's all very machine-dependant, but in my experience you have to suck at computers really bad for a new OSx86 installation to take 8 hours. Mine took about an hour. About the same time as it would have taken me to drive to Market Mall and pick up a MBP.

[llama64]

Windows 7 is a great product, installation took all of an hour and required maybe 5-6 min of actual input time from me. Subsequent driver setup and software was maybe another hour or so (but then I know what I'm doing).

Compared to the crap that was XP and Vista, Win7 is light-years ahead - easily on par with OS X (installing from scratch, not opening your Mac for the first time). Too bad MS still abides with a moronic drive/pathing system and a terrible shell.

[kermitology]

Originally Posted by llama64

Windows 7 is a great product, installation took all of an hour and required maybe 5-6 min of actual input time from me. Subsequent driver setup and software was maybe another hour or so (but then I know what I'm doing).

Compared to the crap that was XP and Vista, Win7 is light-years ahead - easily on par with OS X (installing from scratch, not opening your Mac for the first time). Too bad MS still abides with a moronic drive/pathing system and a terrible shell.

And why do I have to do some magic stuff to handle big files in low level C?! Linux has libraries that make it straight forward, I have to be creative in Windows!

[llama64]

Originally Posted by kermitology

And why do I have to do some magic stuff to handle big files in low level C?! Linux has libraries that make it straight forward, I have to be creative in Windows!

For developers, any *NIX is far better then Windows. That's just a fact and has been the case since January 1, 1970.

But I bet your issue is tied to legacy libraries for dealing with Fat32. Couldn't you import those same libraries into your C app in windows? (clueless web developer who doesn't have to do *real* programming)

[kermitology]

Originally Posted by llama64

For developers, any *NIX is far better then Windows. That's just a fact and has been the case since January 1, 1970.

But I bet your issue is tied to legacy libraries for dealing with Fat32. Couldn't you import those same libraries into your C app in windows? (clueless web developer who doesn't have to do *real* programming)

There is some level of large file support, but you have to be creative using low-level file I/O in the C run time libraries. I really needed to use fread because it's buffered instead of _read.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by llama64

For developers, any *NIX is far better then Windows. That's just a fact and has been the case since January 1, 1970.

That's pretty debatable, not fact. One example: How many of your *NIX systems have ACL support throughout the OS, from the filesystem all the way up into kernel space? The Windows security subsystem is light years ahead of your typical *NIX (although poorly utilized in practice, no argument there)

The Windows and *NIX API's both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I don't think you can accurately declare one outright better than the other.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by kermitology

And why do I have to do some magic stuff to handle big files in low level C?! Linux has libraries that make it straight forward, I have to be creative in Windows!

What kind of magic stuff? Just do memory-mapped I/O and be done with it.

[FanIn80]

Yeah, just memory-map that IO stuff and then loop it through the catastrophic converter into the perpendicular spacial introvertoscope and then just output it via the subatlantic quasimotospehere.

At least, that's what I'd do anyway.

[kermitology]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

What kind of magic stuff? Just do memory-mapped I/O and be done with it.

fopen64 vs _sopen_s + _fdopen

fseek64 vs _lseeki64

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by kermitology

fopen64 vs _sopen_s + _fdopen

fseek64 vs _lseeki64

Memory mapped I/O is the way to go:

Memory-mapped files provide unique methods for managing memory in the Win32 application programming interface. They permit an application to map its virtual address space directly to a file on disk. Once a file has been memory-mapped, accessing its content is reduced to dereferencing a pointer.

A memory-mapped file can also be mapped by more than one application simultaneously. This represents the only mechanism for two or more processes to directly share data in Windows NT. With memory-mapped files, processes can map a common file or portion of a file to unique locations in their own address space. This technique preserves the integrity of private address spaces for all processes in Windows NT.

Memory-mapped files are also useful for manipulating large files. Since creating a memory mapping file consumes few physical resources, extremely large files can be opened by a process and have little impact on the system. Then, smaller portions of the file called "views" can be mapped into the process's address space just before performing I/O.

There are many techniques for managing memory in applications for Win32. Whether you need the benefits of memory sharing or simply wish to manage virtual memory backed by a file on disk, memory-mapped file functions offer the support you need.

[llama64]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

That's pretty debatable, not fact. One example: How many of your *NIX systems have ACL support throughout the OS, from the filesystem all the way up into kernel space? The Windows security subsystem is light years ahead of your typical *NIX (although poorly utilized in practice, no argument there)

The Windows and *NIX API's both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I don't think you can accurately declare one outright better than the other.

My perspective is using the OS as a development environment - and in that regard, Windows is bloody awful. I develop on both and in order to be as productive on a Windows box I have to jump through many hoops getting Cygwin installed or wading through a malange of poor path conventions and irritating command differences.

I have no doubt Windows has a stronger set of API's - just compare the average C# application vs a Linux based rival. But then that's the case when there is a crap ton of money going into the development.

But as a server/development workstation, *NIX has Windows beat and I'll repeat this until MS figures out their shell environment is junk. At least built in SSH would go a long ways...

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by llama64

My perspective is using the OS as a development environment - and in that regard, Windows is bloody awful. I develop on both and in order to be as productive on a Windows box I have to jump through many hoops getting Cygwin installed or wading through a malange of poor path conventions and irritating command differences.

I would say that if you need Cygwin to develop on Windows you’re probably doing it wrong. Visual Studio is a pretty decent development environment.

But bagging on someone else’s build environment is tantamount to teasing them about their choice of text editors - it’s a flamewar that nobody can win, so I will defer to your personal experience.

[llama64]

Vi > Emacs

Unless you're doing .NET development - that would be the only exception to my complaint.