Another bargain for the Aldi fans

[Steve Firth]

That is still complete and utter bollocks.

That would be "me and the vast majority of users." All of this stuff about problems with non Apple peripherals is either (a) Harking back to the days of the Mac 128, 512 or SE or (b) referring to peripherals so old that even Windows doesn't support them.

I still use a PowerMac 601 running System 7 for some jobs, it's so old that it doesn't have USB. So getting anything connected to it is unlikely, some of your comments may apply to that computer. However its contemporary was a 486sx PC running Windows 3.1, care to tell me how many of those are currently running and supporting current PC peripherals? That computer ran for so long and was infinitely upgradeable since all I had to do was to fit yet another driver to the SCSI chain that I never bothered upgrading or buying a new one. It ran for 15 years and indeed still runs today.

Over than same period I went through at least five Wintel laptops and countless numbers of desktop boxes all superseded because they didn't support some peripheral or other or because Windows would no longer run on them. Indeed I have a lock-up with several racks full of PC peripherals that no longer work *with PCs*.

And I repeat for the hard of thinking that just about everything that I have bought recently has bene branded for use with a PC, and has worked just fine with my Mac. Indeed, rather than you being full of piss and wind, I'd love you to tell me which peripherals you have or know of that do not work with the Mac, or for which there is no reasonably priced substitute. And also I'd need proof that those same peripherals also work with Vista.

I agree with you, and what do you find inside a fold? Sheep.

And to make that point, you did of course have to delete all the ad hominem you previously posted and develop teflon shoulders.

Are you related to Drivel?

[Steve Firth]

And to remind others that you are talking about a computer so old that it used a G4 processor. That's like complaining that a 486 and Windows

95 isn't up to the mark anymore.

[The Natural Philosopher]

BUT the salient point is that its less likely on a WINPC than any other platform. I hate the things, but I have to use one.

The mac simply doesn't do the job. Period.

[Steve Firth]

In which case? A journaled file system helps in exactly the cases in which most WinBoxen lose data, an interuption of power or other failure leading to a crash. A journaled file system does not help if the drive is totally foobared but no one said it did or would.

And another red herr "Any system needs regular backups, Macs are little different to any other computer in that respect. A journaled filing system helps, but only an idiot would neglect to back up their system."

[Steve Firth]

More than that, indeed it's interesting that Intel have, with Apple's permission, started to market an Intel motherboard which is the same as the one in the current MacPro, with support for eight core Xeon processors. BTW, excuse me while I laugh at anyone who describes a Mac as "slow" or "expensive", they may care to compare the cost/performace of a MacPro to any PC with eight cores. They may also want to sit down and have a good cry when they compare it to their own "KrappiAldiPC".

And how many PCs have Quad 4GB fibre channel?

[Steve Firth]

On mine they are on the left, out of sight. This is so I can have the Windows bar at the bottom when running Parallels in "coherence" mode.

Hmm, how many Winboxen support drag and drop between Unix, Linux, Windows and MacOS?

[Pete C]

OK, though TNP said:

"Well a 5 year old scanner and A1 plotter both failed utterly to work correctly on MAC OSX"

(Presumably they weren't Apple peripherals)

Well, I just said that you were a Mac user. I didn't mean to infer you didn't back up your Mac, just explain why you were negative about PCs.

cheers, Pete.

[dennis]

Staples.. £79.. will do IBM, Toshiba, Sony and a few others too.. also works from 12V and 24V just in case you need one. Just in case you thought it was hard to get bits for PCs.. where did you say I needed to go to buy a spare power supply for a mac book? BTW most PC notebook supplies don't run hot like mac book supplies appear to so you may want a none Apple PSU next time.

[dennis]

I think you will find that Intel make motherboards and Apple don't. In fact Intel make the motherboards in lots of machines from people like HP.

Is there any applications that can make use of eight cores?

How much Mac book do you get for £299?

Any that need it I would say. There isn't much point if you don't need it and its easy to fit.

[dennis]

The case above where you said a system need regular backups and a journaling file system helps.

BTW NTFS is journaled.

People think they help with backups too.. they don't.

specs of what? file systems? Macs? backup software?

Yes.. have you read what you said and what I said? I still say that journaling does nothing for backups and neither does disk mirroring.

Funny how you can get that antagonistic tone when we almost agree.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It loads it into a suitable app. A text file for example will be claimed by your favourite editor if you've set things for that to happen.

In this case a straightforward text file. So I'd have expected Notepad to claim it.

[Andy Hall]

It would be more reasonable to say that your Mac doesn't do your job any more in the same way that you might say that a 386 with the Win95 monitor doesn't either.

[Andy Hall]

Does it run an Inspiron 5150? 130W? There are 3rd party supplies for this model, but I'm not likely to find one in a PC dealer in Riga.

I could find an MBP one in an Apple if it were required, simply because the range of inventory isn't that large.

If one is traveling, the price of the PSU is irrelevant if it makes the difference between being able to work or not.

The MBP supply doesn't run hot.

[Andy Hall]

.. and very good it is too.

I was quite impressed with Parallels, especially, as you say the coherence mode.

I am a bit more impressed with VMWare in that it manages USB a bit more smoothly even for a 1.0 version.

I think that once they have produced a 2.0 version, it will eclipse Parallels to an extent.

[Andy Hall]

Did you want a trip somewhere?

Believe me, when you go somewhere or other pretty much every week, it's less than interesting to make them for non-work purposes.

I don't think I've spent any airline frequent flyer points for nearly 10 years

[Andrew Gabriel]

You are correct. It is however the only journaled filesystem I've come across which is unrecoverably trashed by removing the power from the system whilst filesystem is in heavy use. I suspect the journalling in NT is for speed, and not resilience against unexpected system outage.

[Clive George]

And it knows how to do this by having an file type code as part of the file, rather than using a file extension. I like that.

Windows/unix have no real concept of file type, unlike RISC OS where it was designed in from the beginning (dunno about mac). Windows works by file extensions, hence bits like "hide file extensions" where it encourages people to not know about them.

Personally I use a command shell to do things like opening files in a text editor.

cheers, clive

[dennis]

Maybe? Its not a problem I have come across.

Anyway it takes a lot more to ensure a system will always restart successfully after a crash. I have seen plenty of instances where a config file has been half written when a system crashed and it then failing to restart due to an invalid config. Journaling does not stop that, only proper system and application design. The first rule of which is to avoid keeping your configs in multiple files like Unix does in places and nearly every damn programmer does unless you are damn certain they never change.

[dennis]

And if I create a text file on my Linux machine and call it bill and give it you on a USB stick its going to know its text how? You can put mime types and encodings in windows files IIRC and it will handle them correctly.. however most still use extensions as its easy.

So what would RISC OS do with my text file bill above? Does RISC OS guess at it by having a quick nose around to see if it looks like text? Sounds like it would be fun to create some odd file types and see what happens.

I usually right click and select edit.. somewhat safer than double clicking.

[The Natural Philosopher]

In fact they were respectively an HP designjet 450C plotter and a HP Scanjet 4100C scanner.

Gimp almost worked with them. No other program did, although I found a Mac app that could read the scanner correctly, but it cost as much as a new scanner.

And didn't integrate with other programs, so it was necessary to scan-to-file and import the file separately.