Aspies For Freedom

I just bought a new iMac yesterday.

Just a PowerBook G4 and a MacBook here.

I have a PowerPC Power Mac G5, which is pretty fast(I want a Macbook Air with a SSD though)

Also I have an Apple II and a NeXT in my garage(Yes, I know they're not technically macs...).

iBook here, but hardly ever use it due to a broken battery. Got it cheap off ebay and haven't got round to fixing the battery.

i have an Imac, it's awesome so far, but soon enough someone will make a mac virus and kill it, Macs still can't get viruses right?

im going to stop posting here now....

I'm not so sure about that... A bunch of my relatives are what I refer to as "Mac supremacists" (that is, they only use Apple computers and act like they are so much better than everyone else because of it), and they are constantly having to send off their computers to be repaired and whatnot. Just yesterday the USB port on my cousin's iBook or whatever it's called suddenly stopped working, so she's going to have to get that fixed. Furthermore, it seems like they have to replace their computers at least once a year because they get too broken/outdated to be "usable". And then they go saying how thier computers never get viruses and never crash, neither of which are true (my cousin's computer crashes every 10 minutes it seems).

I've had the same Toshiba laptop (with Windows XP) since I was a junior in highschool, and it still runs fine. It has the internet, Photoshop, and a few games, which is basically all I want. I'm not against Apple, though; I just think that their home computers are not as great and reliable as they claim they are. I do have an iPhone and I think it's probably the second most useful electronic device I've owned (after my laptop), but even it's not perfect. It still crashes every so often, but once I restart it, it's fine. I think Apple makes the highest-quality portable mp3 players.

For the people who hate the pretentious Mac commercials: http://mvpc.ytmnd.com/

More on the reliability of PCs: When it comes to what to expect in terms of quality, I think it largely depends on what manufacturer makes the computer. I have always read that Japanese computers, similar to Japanese cars, tend to be (on average) better-built and more reliable than American brands. That's why I got a Toshiba as opposed to a Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, etc. My brother used to work at a computer store and he said the vast majority of computers coming in for repairs were those made by American companies, and very few were from brands like Toshiba or Sony.

My computer is a 2.8 GHz iMac, one of the new ones with the 24" screen. But old enough to have a stinkin' ATI card. Other than than, the machine is very satisfactory.

At work I use a Mac Pro with 4 x 2.8 GHz Dualcores, 16 GB RAM and 1 TB hard drive.

It is an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256 MB

True, and if I had waited three more weeks or so, I'd have an iMac with a stronger CPU and a quite good nVidia card.

I just hope that Starcraft 2 will run on my machine if it comes out this year. Otherwise, I'd need to update my machine by... buying a new one

No, I am not saying that the ATI cards are always worse than nVidia cards; it's more the drivers (yea, I know that there is no real difference between software and hardware on a von-Neumann-machine).

For me, there are two reasons:

1. subjective: ATI's logo and their whole marketing sucks. nVidia somehow comes across as being positive to me.

2. objective: as I work heavily with computer graphics, I have encountered a number of issues related to the ATI card drivers, like: ok, standard OpenGL and GLSL should do this and that, but it is different for ATI (and sometimes only implemented in software, because the driver does not trigger the hardware) and some obscure offset needs to be added, some obscure floating-point imprecision needs to be addressed for ATI cards, some crashes need to be prevented on ATI... and so on. If some customer or co-worker has a really strange problem with running our software, it is mostly a problem of the ATI card driver.

So, in conclusion I can say, in my own world ATI suxx and they provide stupid drivers to everyone.

Do not trust benchmark tests too much. They test only what they are designed to test. And may contain optimized code for certain cards. Or just do not test some weaknesses. It is not only about pure numbers in Hz, Byte or Bus.

For example, my card (the 2600) is fast enough to render a direct volume rendering of some huge MRI (magnetic resonance image) in real-time. But, because of driver issues, simple 2D views of the same MRI yield artifacts, appearing as horizontal and vertical lines over the image, and seemingly random white spots distributed across the image. The line-artifacts result from different computational results for texture border coordinates (with 'different' as in 'different than the rest of the world and different from the own specification') while the latter... well, we'd need more time for finding the reason. But why should we invest time into correcting ATI's bad drivers? Nah, we just go on recommending everyone NOT to buy an ATI card.

But at the time I bought the iMac I am currently writing this post with, they all had an ATI card built in.

And yes, I used to built PCs by myself all the years before. But I got tired of Windows, I cannot stand the Windows windows and all the brain-dead marketing crap around it. I started to develop at work under Mac OS X and this was a huge productivity boost. Not only because of the freakin' fast machine, but also because of the more soothing overall aesthetics and 'niceness' of the Mac. Yes, this will wear down some time, and the computer is just a tool. But I like fine tools, here and there.


Just read your post before committing this one: funny, though, what was your test material?

in German, there is a proverb: "Wat dem eenen sin Uhl is dem annern sin Nachtigall".

Ok, thanks for the information. So, in the general gaming world, ATI leads, and in the scientific visualization community, nVidia leads. That is fine, no?


Hum. Isn't an 'MX' card some kind of a down-tuned version, costing less money? I would not expect such a card to do more than displaying the explorer... which also did not work you said >_<

k. You mean those nVidia Quadro (ATI FireGL) cards? Formerly, they could drive more monitors than the regular customer cards. Now, they offer slightly different rendering pipelines (and commands on it), implemented in hardware, which are especially interesting in CAD (computer aided design) applications. They are the CISC GPUs (kind of a joke). By altering the firmware of a Quadro, you can use it like any other nVidia card of that generation, but you cannot upgrade a 'normal' nVidia card to be a Quadro by changing the firmware.

Yea, the rest is like talking religion >>_<<