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The Mac Pro Lives

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Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#621

Post by HelloNurse »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #493
HelloNurse wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using a large corpus of Powershell scripts, mostly written by enthusiastic Microsoft consultants, and even if I know exactly what they do I cannot stand the mysterious imports, the sequences of script invocations and bare statements that leave the session with the desired invisible state (and, conversely, closing and reopening the session after every major command just in case), the automagical option handling, a…

To play devil's advocate, UNIX sh shell scripts are pretty mysterious too, and often leave the local environment polluted and other such no-nos.

Environment variables (and files) are very easy to inspect and change, the invisible bunch of objects in a Powershell session are not.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#622

Post by alkonaut »

Wow. I don't know what the time scales are when companies like Dell or Zotac spit out one of their bespoke desktop towers, but "not this year" for something they obviously already worked on for a while seems long.

Obviously the trash can was a huge design effort and I get the feeling they want to be just as revolutionary this time if they spend so much time, when they are obviously in a hurry.

Shouldn't they just be making a new 2 socket cheese grater tower? As simple as possible? The USP of the Mac is Mac OS, not that it uses a custom power supply.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#623

Post by juandazapata »

johndoe4589 wrote: post #607
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…

Let's not mince words. Ubuntu and linux OS'es in general are TRASH as far as user experience is concerned. Lately I even tried elementaryOS, and it's worse than Ubuntu. They keep saying how it's not a copy of OS X, and it evidently isn't as far as user experience is concerned, but on top of that they're obviously inspired by a design that's now completely outdated. At least Ubuntu is looking ahead and thinking of tou…

"Linux is free, only if you don't value your own time" - Some guy that I don't remember

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#624

Post by mrkstu »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #558
ovao wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are provided in WSL, but the Windows Subsystem for Linux is a separate install atop Windows, and the installation process is currently very complex and lengthy.

Windows key, type "developer mode", hit enter, click "developer mode" (or 3x tabs, space, enter). PowerShell, send "lxrun /install /y" Done. Pro-tip. Pin PowerShell to your taskbar and drag all the way left. Now you can open it with win+1. Edit: now with no mouse required!

After going to the Windows store and upgrading to Windows Pro. That's another advantage of OS X- no need to target various OS revisions- the baseline OS IS the OS.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#625

Post by nemothekid »

willtim wrote: post #618
johndoe4589 wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not mince words. Ubuntu and linux OS'es in general are TRASH as far as user experience is concerned. Lately I even tried elementaryOS, and it's worse than Ubuntu. They keep saying how it's not a copy of OS X, and it evidently isn't as far as user experience is concerned, but on top of that they're obviously inspired by a design that's now completely outdated. At least Ubuntu is looking ahead and thinking of tou…

Free software offers a spectrum of quality and innovation; and you've picked the worst of it. I use a desktop (i3), package manager (nix), editor (Emacs), programming language (GHC Haskell), file system (ZFS), bidirectional sync (unison) and security​ (gnupg) that are collectively far more innovative, powerful and stable than anything Apple have ever produced. Of course, if you are specifically looking for consumer t…

>Of course, if you are specifically looking for consumer tech, ease of use and support, then open source probably isn't for you.

If you can look past your smugness a bit, why? Why is it that if I want "ease of use", open source isn't for me? Do you not see the problem here? I can't see how you can argue your favorite projects are more "innovative & stable than anything Apple have ever produced", but in the same breath say that open source isn't for someone who wants ease of use. What exactly does "stable" mean to you?

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#626

Post by willtim »

omg_ketchup wrote: post #612
chrisper wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it is the attitude that makes it "TRASH." It seems you have only tried Unity and elementaryOS? Right now I use Cinnamon, which is similar enough to Windows to not be "TRASH" imho. Also here is a Linux joke for you: If you don't like certain things, just fork it and do your own thing.

Cinnamon is good. Until you try to install a modern nvidia driver. At least, that was the case 6 months ago. Dual monitors should be plug & play. I shouldn't have to add a new repository to apt-get, I shouldn't have to choose between 15 Nouveau drivers and 15 potentially system-breaking nvidia drivers. It should "just work". Dual monitors, and just display output in general... this is 2017, this is very basic, expect…

I suggest you choose your distribution and software more wisely. Yes, this is the big disadvantage of freedom and choice.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#627

Post by astrodust »

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.

The whole PC industry is slowing down. I have a gaming rig built around a 2600K, a chip from 2011, and it's perfectly adequate. There's no urgent reason to upgrade to a newer chip like the 7700K just to get a maybe 50% speed boost. The only reason I'm even considering it is because of wanting to bump to a 1080 for VR.

The days of performance doubling every 18 months are completely over. Now it's more about power efficiency and more cores rather than peak single-thread performance.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#628

Post by Keyframe »

mwill wrote: post #523
Keyframe wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you go into a bit more detail? You're running Windows and Linux on Mac in a VM with graphics acc. at almost native speeds? Or on Linux running Windows, and possibly MacOS when (big IF) Nvidia releases Pascal drivers? If it's on Linux running Windows - I'm all ears.

Linux running Windows. Recent Linux kernels and have added the ability to pass through PCI devices to QEMU guests. I run NixOS with Windows 10, Windows 7, and Ubuntu guests. Only one guest can be run at a time. I have a second GPU with a second screen that gets passed directly to the VM. I use numactl and nice to half surrender half my CPU cores to the VM and static huge pages to hand over a chunk of memory. The VM a…

Thanks! This sounds almost exactly like something I need. Why separate keyboard and mouse though? Only difference that I would prefer is to retain the same keyboard/mouse/tablet and monitors (three of them) and to be able to easily switch between the two, preferably to have copy and paste working between the two. Alternative, I'm pursuing right now, is a KVM with synergy, but I have limited deskside space (for machines) - I'd rather have one machine with 20 cores and four graphics cards than two machines.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#629

Post by Corrado »

shadowmint wrote: post #426
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…

It is a thoughtfully crafted product regarding what "command-line interface" should look like. How so? I've never appreciated what's actually good about powershell... you pass objects around? So...? Is that a thing that's useful? If you want to just automate a task, having intermediate objects that are serializable (eg. strings) so you can `foo ... > blah` and inspect the value of blah before continuing (`cat blah |…

I've been using PS for quite a bit of AWS automation lately and I have to say that I don't like it. Sure, you can pass objects around, but I've happened upon more than one cmdlet that does the wrong thing with the incoming object. In one case I was passing a "String" object to a cmdlet that accepts strings and it didn't know what to do with the object so it generated a fairly obtuse error. I had to manually cast the String object to a string. Grrr...

Another thing that bothers me is the lack of single line composability. In most Unix shells you can pipe things around with abandon; it's not pretty but it works. One more than one occasion, while working with PS, I've had to create a cmdlet because there is no way (or I don't know how) to store intermediate values between cmdlets. One example was processing things in a loop. I had to store the current value in a variable and then process that variable in another line. I know someone here will give a solution, but I looked for an hour before giving up and creating a script file.

On top of everything else, the cmdlets from Microsoft have differing switches for the same thing. One command might use -ServerName while another command will use -ComputerName. So, basically, you end up looking everything up before you can use it. I know Bash isn't much better, but at least I can expect that the tools are separate and not really designed to work together. I was expecting more consistency from PowerShell.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#630

Post by willtim »

nemothekid wrote: post #625
willtim wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free software offers a spectrum of quality and innovation; and you've picked the worst of it. I use a desktop (i3), package manager (nix), editor (Emacs), programming language (GHC Haskell), file system (ZFS), bidirectional sync (unison) and security​ (gnupg) that are collectively far more innovative, powerful and stable than anything Apple have ever produced. Of course, if you are specifically looking for consumer t…

>Of course, if you are specifically looking for consumer tech, ease of use and support, then open source probably isn't for you. If you can look past your smugness a bit, why? Why is it that if I want "ease of use", open source isn't for me? Do you not see the problem here? I can't see how you can argue your favorite projects are more "innovative & stable than anything Apple have ever produced", but in the same breat…

Ubuntu are trying for ease-of-use and it's a noble goal. But if you are going to judge them only on ease-of-use, then it is difficult for them to compete with the resources of Apple, who are the richest company on the planet.

My point was that there are quality open-source projects out there, after you appeared to assert otherwise. But ease-of-use is not something developers/startups seem to be interested in spending time on.

If you want me to qualify stable, then let's compare Apple's bidirectional iCloud sync to Unison, or Time Machine to ZFS snapshots.

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