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Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

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81–90 of 213 posts

Re: Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

#81
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beautiful? There's a reason why it got the name, it looks like a trashcan. And the old mac pro is filled with garbage(how fitting, right?). If it was any good then apple would have stuck to it, but it was garbage, so they didn't. Now we have the new mac pro, and it's a big step up from the trashcan.

Yes, and lots of very smart designers have put lots of time over many decades into making trashcans look good. The apple trashcan certainly looks vastly better than other commercially available workstations.

> The apple trashcan certainly looks vastly better than other commercially available *trashcans.

Re: Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

#82
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beautiful? There's a reason why it got the name, it looks like a trashcan. And the old mac pro is filled with garbage(how fitting, right?). If it was any good then apple would have stuck to it, but it was garbage, so they didn't. Now we have the new mac pro, and it's a big step up from the trashcan.

Yes, and lots of very smart designers have put lots of time over many decades into making trashcans look good. The apple trashcan certainly looks vastly better than other commercially available workstations.

It's a shame really, I feel like we've lost something from the years of SGI workstations that looked like they came straight from the future.

Re: Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it's not just Avid. Some audio production software such as ReFX Nexus still uses a USB dongle. There is no way to use the software without it plugged in. It also has a policy where if you damage the dongle, you have to buy again and get a 10% discount off the FULL price of the VST. In the age of people gigging on laptops, I'm not entirely sure how they think they are gonna sell any more of them. I fancy it myself…

To add to that, it's not just media production. In the medical field, almost all software for performing and analyzing EKGs, X-rays, MRIs etc. comes by default with some sort of dongle-based protection. Apparently, it's not enough that you need the biggest dongle in the world (i.e. the machine itself!) to use the software. Some vendors do offer alternatives if you fight them hard enough but the default still is a tri…

Apparently, it's not enough that you need the biggest dongle in the world (i.e. the machine itself!) to use the software.

Same for a lot of other industrial equipment. In my (admittedly limited) experience, they get cracked pretty quickly by the owner, either before the factory ever gets any downtime, or right after the first time.

Re: Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

#84
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing sounds like industry-specific anecdotes from a very common, cross-industry reality about non technical users.

I'd revise that to the far more irritating segment of users who think they're more technical than they really are. Actual non technical users are fine, because they generally know when they don't understand a thing. The thinks-their-technical users will bravely throw in whatever phrases they've heard mentioned in relation to a completely unrelated problem.

It's definitely not unique to Hollywood... Before I switched to infrastructure development I ran a Linux engineering group and among other things handled production support escalations. The job was often finding the actual problem while gently dissuading my customer the issue wasn't a pet theory and/or something they just Googled. In fact sometimes the escalations came specifically so I could weigh in on root cause after joining the bridge because the various parties couldn't agree.

A favorite was someone to run free and declare the system was "out of memory and must be swapping". It recurred so often I think that theory passed from group to group like a treasured heirloom until we wrote a FAQ on the subject. Fortunately in my opinion getting ops and development to work together built mutual respect for respective skill sets.

Re: Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

#85

Whats with this kneejerk advice? Honestly who turns off their macs? Are they talking about sleep mode?

I remember back in the day when every "creative type" doing anything on a Mac would reboot before starting a new big Photoshop or Illustrator project.

This was before Macs had memory protection and one process could stomp on another processes' memory if there was a wild pointer. After running any large application for a while, before starting a different one, it was standard practice to reboot.

Re: Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

#86
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and lots of very smart designers have put lots of time over many decades into making trashcans look good. The apple trashcan certainly looks vastly better than other commercially available workstations.

> The apple trashcan certainly looks vastly better than other commercially available *trashcans.

I don’t think anyone who’s ever shopped for designer trashcans would agree with this :P

Re: Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

#87
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must really be annoying someone over at apple. Spend all that time design something beautiful. And... Everyone calls it garbage

We also call them "trashcans" in conversation. It's an identifiable and memorable term, rather than "mac pro (original/2006)", "mac pro (cylinder/2013)" or "mac pro (cheese grater/2019)"

Didn't the original Mac Pro look like a cheese grater, too?

Re: Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

#88
post #78
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, will you refuse to help me if I call you in deep distress and said that "xcode command line tools is failing to update because of the nginx 503 errors clearly visible in Safari"

Yes

well, you're not wrong

Re: Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood

#90
post #64

Whats with this kneejerk advice? Honestly who turns off their macs? Are they talking about sleep mode?

Don't you have to still reboot Macs to apply certain updates?

You do. OP sounds like a typical end user. Waits a year to reboot and then gets mad that updates take an hour to download and install.
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