Mac Owners Are Snobs

The Street ^ | 2/16/2008 | Brittany Umar

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

Precisely what I’m trying to do; become educated. Dh bought me an imac for Christmas. I’m starting with nothing, except little pieces of help from FReepers. One day, I’ll get on over to the area Apple store and learn even more. Until then, I’ll continue to ask questions, which unfortunately means I’ll continue to tolerate posts such as yours.

[Swordmaker]

I’m just trying to get you to stick to the subject. Have you ever seen the beach ball spinning on your Mac? It’s a simple question even (only) Mac user should be able to answer.

[X] Yes
[ ] No
[ ] I refuse to admit it and will therefore change the subject.

See my answer above in your questionnaire.

Is the spinning beach ball a problem? No.

I am currently gamma testing the latest release of Pagestream Pro 5.0 for OSX and have seen a few, but not many, that have required me to force quit the application. But that is the a new release of a vintage product on a platform on which it has not worked except as a Classic app.

For everyday use? I have not seen a spinning beach ball that has required a Force Quit of an application for months... actually since I upgraded to Leopard. The Beach Ball just indicates the application is currently busy.

Now have you seen the flipping hour glass on your PC?

[ ] Yes
[ ] No
[ ] I refuse to admit that it is the SAME THING as the spinning beach ball.

[MississippiMan]

Bless your heart and thx for the welcome!

WinMe was indeed a HIDEOUS operating system. UGH. Easy to understand a change away from that. :-)

MM (in TX)

[Swordmaker]

I’m still seeing those ads but less frequently than before. Did Apple rehire the twit?

They never fired him. The original new article was... wait for it... WRONG!

[Swordmaker]

I find it odd that a Mac can’t bring itself to show a hour glass so it puts up a spinning beach ball, this while PC users have not seen anything functionally like it on a PC in years.

Why, what's so especially correct about an hourglass? The Mac used to use a little watch with a spinning hand on its old system... so what?

[Pablo64]

I know that I haven't even explored the potential that my Mac has, since I didn't even know that you could run Vista on a Mac. I thought they were like oil and water.

Learn something every day.

[D-fendr]

So, I can use my old mouse? What about my old keyboard?

Use whatever USB mouse and keyboard you wish. If you have some non-USB interface peripheral, likely an adapter will work.

You can also use whatever monitor you want. If you have all these, you can get a new Mac for about $600.

[dbacks]

Captain Obvious pops up again.

[Swordmaker]

The movie actually showed how Jobs and Gates when on a pilgrimage to XEROX PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and saw what was the first usable graphical interface for a microprocessor based computer. Both Jobs and Gates went forward to develop their respective GUIs. The difference is that Apple got sued by XEROX for infringing on their look and feel.

The difference is that Apple WON that lawsuit because they paid Xerox for the tours and for anything they learned on the tour with 1.5 million shares of Pre-IPO Apple Preferred stock... and in addition showed that the look and feel of Mac OS and Xerox Star's GUI were not similar. The lawsuit was brought by a later Xerox CEO who was unaware of the agreement and payment. Xerox sold the stock after Apple's IPO in 1980 for a large profit.

[Swordmaker]

I suggest you defrag the hard drive, and repair your permissions.

Uh, blu? The Mac defrags itself... on the fly.

[Swordmaker]

What movie showed that?

This one: "Prates of Silicon Valley".

You can watch it on the link... 97 Minutes.

[Swordmaker]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Apple_iMac_USB_mouse.png

Ah, the infamous hockey puck mouse... available for only 7 months 10 years ago... Want me to bring up Bob? Or Windows ME... or Windows Vista?

[acoulterfan]

LOL, I am still using my 10 or more year old Gateway VX900 19” monitor with my G4 Powermac. I wish it would die so I can go out and get one of thos Apple cinema-series or what ever those Mac monitors are called.

If the little ball spins too long for me I just right click on the application in the dock and click force quit. It is that easy. I don’t need to do that very often at all, though. It just closes that application.

[blu]

Sorry, I sometimes forget which system I’m using...and switching between OS 9, 10.3 and Leopard all in one day makes my mind fragged!!! If I could stand to let the kinders touch my new one, I’d get rid of the rest...but that isn’t going to happen.

[LeGrande]

When I start on rants about how terrible a language C++ is, or how these young punks cranking out software have no friggin’ clue how much their ignorance of cache line or data structure alignment of their data structures is costing in terms of CPU wait cycles, nearly every computer user’s eyes glaze over, then roll back in their heads.

What language would you recommend then? I have been out of the game for a while and I am thinking about jumping back in.

[blu]

Hey, c’mon over to the girls side of the room. No question is too weird for us! No tech-geek speak here. Did you know you can set your screensaver to be all the photos in your iPhoto library?

[jacquej]

can’t splain it, beause I have been right-clicking away with my mighty mouse for a couple of years now.

Before that I used a third party mouse (Kensington, IIRR. And before that, I just “ctrl-clk”ed.

Geesh!

[Sea Mac]

You mentioned you had recently got a Mac but didn't have any software for it.
There are lots of nice freeware applications for Macintosh X listed over at Software Santa

TORCS is a extreme formula one race simulator:
that will give your graphics card a workout!
So will Flight Gear a FREE Flight Simulator!

Here I AM tooling along in my antique DH "Beaver" towards downtown San Diego ...

And it's not just all games either! Open Office / Inkscape / Scribus / GIMPShop / Audacity / MacTheRipper / VLC / Celestia - just tons of stuff to make your Mac (Or Linux, or Windows) system GO!

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Oh, make SURE you get the iLife install DVD out of your documentation package and install it. (If you got an iLife disk in with your Install DVDs, that is) that's got things like iDVD, iMovie, Garage Band, iPhoto, and iChat on it.

[Swordmaker]

He said simply, “Mac makes our presentations do backflips, but can it defrag a DNA string, and send the code to Hopkins? Hardly.”

That's strange... because he is wrong... It can and does... and is used extensively in DNA research.

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Geospiza to Deliver Finch Sequencing Center As Power Mac G5 Platform Bundle

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 27, 2004

DNA Sequencing Data, Analysis and Workflow Management Software Increases Productivity of Research Teams and Core Sequencing Labs

Geospiza today announced the April 2004 release date for the 64-bit PowerPC version of the Finch(R) Sequencing Center in a groundbreaking software/hardware bundle with the Apple(R) Power Mac G5 dual processor computer. The combination of Geospiza's DNA sequencing data and workflow management software with Apple's PowerMac G5 provides life science research teams with a low-cost end-to-end system that improves data reliability and the ability to share research data with colleagues while accelerating time-to-results.

Geospiza's Finch Sequencing Center is the life science industry's leading Web-based system that links the management of DNA sequencing orders and laboratory workflow with the advanced bioinformatics and data visualization tools researchers need to assess data quality and produce more meaningful scientific results. Many of these algorithms are computationally intensive. The Apple Power Mac G5, one of the fastest PCs ever built, delivers accelerated time-to-results for scientists who often need to run multiple experiments to obtain the answers they seek.

'

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and....

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Apple Releases Apple/Genentech BLAST, Significantly Accelerating Protein and DNA Searches For The Biomedical Community

Up To Five Times Faster Than 2-GHz Pentium 4-based Systems

CUPERTINO, California—February 7, 2002—Apple® today announced a breakthrough implementation of BLAST software that accelerates protein and DNA searches used in biomedical research and drug discovery. Apple/Genentech BLAST is up to five times faster than the standard BLAST implementation, the popular bioinformatics tool from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Apple/Genentech BLAST provides improved accuracy and speed over the standard NCBI BLAST, depending on search parameters such as the nucleotide match-length. For certain common searches this version enables a dual 1-GHz Power Mac™ G4 computer to deliver more than five times the performance of a comparable 2-GHz Pentium 4-based system running the standard NCBI BLAST.

“Apple and Genentech have dramatically increased the performance of an important tool that biomedical researchers use every day,” said David Botstein, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Stanford University Genetics Department. “I’m impressed and delighted that a machine that a regular scientist can afford and run, such as the Power Mac G4, is as fast, or faster, than the industry standard BLAST running on more expensive machines.”

“We’re pleased to have collaborated with Apple on this project and to be able to make these performance improvements more widely available to the scientific community through the NCBI and Apple’s Advanced Computation Group,” said Richard H. Scheller, Ph.D., senior vice president of Research, Genentech. “The Apple/Genentech BLAST will allow researchers to more efficiently utilize genomic information in basic biomedical research and drug discovery.”

Developed by Apple’s Advanced Computation Group (ACG) in collaboration with Genentech, Inc. and the Stanford University Genetics Department, Apple/Genentech BLAST is a high-throughput version of BLAST which takes advantage of algorithmic improvements, advanced memory management and the ability of Apple’s PowerPC G4 processor with Velocity Engine™ to perform multiple operations per clock cycle.

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and...

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Human Genome Sciences - Apple Probes the Gene Pool for Genomics Pioneer

Cracking the code on genes requires some serious information management. In fact genomics, the systematic study of all genes of an organism, generates such vast amounts of data, the data itself can become a major research bottleneck. At Human Genome Sciences, genomics pioneer and drug developer, Macs are the key to controlling data flow, enabling researchers to dramatically speed the development of vital drugs.

Human Genome Sciences (HGS) is a biopharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, manufactures, and hopes to market new gene and protein-based drugs. But the company’s impact on the pharmaceutical industry is more far-reaching than that. HGS not only pioneered the field of genomics, but also was among the first to create an integrated, genomics-based drug discovery and development capability. The result: instead of a single research laboratory conducting only a few thousand experiments each year, labs can tap into databases — of HGS and others — containing information on millions of gene-based experiments. And that, in turn, enables researchers to find more answers more quickly, dramatically speeding development of vital drugs.

Making use of huge volumes of data, like gene sequence and protein information, requires significant computational power. To date, HGS has performed more than three million gene-sequencing experiments, each creating a data object of about 150,000 bytes. Thousands of these data objects are collected, analyzed, and stored each day. As the standard platform at HGS, the Power Macintosh is used for everything from analyzing data to communicating results, playing an integral role in HGS’s groundbreaking efforts.

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Professional Gene Sequencing Software for Apple Mac

And that's without even going into the UNIX gene programs... where there are hundreds...

[Old Sarge]

Hmmm... *scratching his head*