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The Mac Pro Lives

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Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#411

Post by pat2man »

nemik wrote: post #246
csomar wrote: post #178

Am I the only one that sees OS X as the biggest reason to switch to Mac? I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X. And please, don't tell me Ubuntu or other linux flavors. They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations). Also god forbid you have a problem (especially a har…

Personally, rather than thinner/lighter I'd pay for it to be a bit bigger but capable of letting me open it up and replace RAM and the SSD as was possible up to the 2013 ones.

The resell market is good enough that you can sell your laptop and buy one with the upgrades you want for around the price the upgrade would have cost.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#412

Post by yokohummer7 »

jrimbault wrote: post #269
yokohummer7 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous. It is PowerShell, and it really is. Until recently I thought Windows had poor CLI support, and I discovered PowerShell and now I favor it even more than bash. Am I crazy? Possibly, but PowerShell is truly a piece of gem in the CLI history. It is a thoughtfully craf…

But why is it that the PowerShell terminal emulator is (graphically) even worse than a tty ? I've worked on ttys more agreeable on the eyes than Windows terminal emulators. Windows is supposed to have better font support than Linux. Also, if someone here has an answer: Why in the design of Windows aren't programs installed or symlinked in the PATH by default? I guess that was a design choice somewhere along the histo…

> Why in the design of Windows aren't programs installed or symlinked in the PATH by default? I guess that was a design choice somewhere along the history of Windows/DOS. Is there a reason?

Windows' way of program executable placement is using the holy Registry. It's called 'Application Registration'[1] and was introduced to reduce the needs to modify the system-wide PATH variable. (They thought it was a bad idea to modify a system variable so frequently, and I partially agree.)

You can find registered applications in `HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths`. Very few programs use that feature, which is unfortunate, but popular applications like Chrome and Firefox register themselves in it. That's why you can invoke `chrome` in the 'Run' dialog.

Edit: Another context to add: at the time App Paths was added, to modify PATH you had to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT manually which was painful. Not only that, but also PATH had a length limitation of 128 characters. You can find more details in the Raymond Chen's blog, as useful as always.[2]

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee8...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110725-00/?p=...

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#413

Post by jacquesm »

skinnymuch wrote: post #407
icebraining wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in my experience, but in any case, it's still equivalent to buying at that reduced price.

It's not equivalent. Buying is far easier than selling.

> Buying is far easier than selling.

That's an essential insight for anybody that ever wants to run a business, and it is why sales people get paid the big bucks and purchasers are only as good as the discounts they get.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#414

Post by ralfd »

draw_down wrote: post #291
VelNZ wrote: post #229

Wow, what a torrent of negativity on this thread, I didn't see a single positive comment reading through the top level. This is excellent news, I'm chugging along on a 2010 Mac Pro and was very disappointed when the Apple Displays were cancelled last year. They are a staple of the lineup and always look gorgeous compared to what's on the market. I will definitely be buying the new Mac Pro and 2 displays to go with it…

I'm sorry but you should be at the very least impatient with them, as a customer. This thing doesn't even come out until 2018 and you're using the 2010. Look, I use Apple products all day, damn near every computing device I have is made by them. It's just astounding how they've let this languish. Very bad.

This. We have still 8 months left. How hard can it be to design a tower? I guess Apple is having some interesting trick in their sleeve, but come on, how long could it take? Just throw a few more engineers on it!

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#415

Post by jharger »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #358
Keyframe wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective: If MacOS had: up-to-date OpenGL support, Nvidia made drivers that supported new cards for it, was not locked into Mac hardware - that would be tremendous. On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous. If Linux, any desktop variant (Fedora my poison), had Adobe's support for their DCC apps an…

Agree on the OpenGL support. I really wish Apple would just update OpenGL to the newest OpenGL so I wouldn't have to change platforms completely in the near future. Then again, developing for Apple currently means more compatibility with old hardware and drivers, but OpenGL 4.3 (which Apple doesn't support) includes Compute Shaders, something I would really like to explore, but can't as Apple supports only 4.2 with a…

Why not use Metal?

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#416

Post by coryfklein »

m_fayer wrote: post #403
Eun wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Window management in OSX is horrible. Finder is even more horrible. It reminds me of the Windows 95 Explorer. A network drive hangs? Good luck with Finder..., the whole system halts.

The fact that finder doesn't let you retrieve or enter your current FS path just like a URL in a browser is criminal.

Drag the icon in the top center of the window onto your text editor or terminal, it will paste the full path from the Finder window.

Admittedly it's annoying that this feature is hidden and requires dragging with the mouse, but it is possible.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#417

Post by wlesieutre »

nottorp wrote: post #388
wlesieutre wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone's looking for information on silent PCs, http://silentpcreview.com/ is a handy resource. I briefly ran a hackintosh when my Biostar motherboard died and I was frustrated with how slow my old Macbook Air was running. Pretty simple process: replaced it with a Gigabyte, downloaded an installer image from my Mac, and used to TonyMac tools to set it up. Unfortunately wasn't able to get Xcode to work reliably. Ev…

I'm not sure it's the hackintosh... now and then I hear a lot of complaints about a particular version of xcode even on native macs. I don't use it, but I have work colleagues who do.

I was running the same version of Xcode on the same version of Mac OS on a 4-5 year old Macbook Air and it worked fine there, just slow.

I've certainly had Xcode crash once in a while, but this was something else. Tried reinstalling it and no change. I don't think I even got it to finish a build.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#418

Post by exabrial »

I hope they don't remove all the ports and give it wireless charging... :D

J/K This is great news. I <3 OSX, but lately the hardware has been heading into reverse innovation

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#419

Post by scott_karana »

antfarm wrote: post #337
driverdan wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and was very disappointed when the Apple Displays were cancelled last year. They are a staple of the lineup and always look gorgeous compared to what's on the market. Have you looked at what's on the market? There are many great displays out there now, all far better than Apple's offerings. Apple's displays were good for about a year before the competition surpassed them.

I think the parent post was referring to the design of Apple displays, not their display quality ...

The "you can only tilt" design that forces you to put them on boxes merely to change height? ;-)

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#420

Post by floatboth »

Keyframe wrote: post #371
corndoge wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not run your favorite *nix and stick windows in a VM for the few applications that don't support Linux?

Great question. I use, all the time, applications which need full speed and full GPU support of which some are only on Linux and some are only on Windows and there's some overlap where most from both are on MacOS. Simple VM doesn't cut it, I've tried.

What about the other way around, Windows host + *nix VMs? I run FreeBSD in VirtualBox, forwarding apps to VcXsrv via PuTTY. Works very well. I even made a tray icon script to launch that setup https://github.com/myfreeweb/xvmmgr/blob/master/xvmmgr.psm1 :)
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