lenthamen wrote:
@C210_Flyer if you consider to upgrade to Windows 10: Be aware that it comes with serious privacy issues.
Im seriously pissed at all the BS of these companies and the NSA. I dont go on facebook because I dont want everyone to know my business unless I tell them. That is my right. But to have some asshole look into what Im doing to make a buck or worse, is infuriating.
Can anyone imagine if the Nazis had everyones info on “Face Book run by Adolf” would any Jew have escaped them?
My background was from a time you didnt say anything cause even the walls had ears and people disappeared day or night. To then have these creeps pull this crap is infuriating. Wish I could find and then send some illegal porn onto the chief execs at microsoft then call the cops on them. Just desserts Id say.
No I will never get Windows 10 ever.
I would not compare FB with anything the Nazis did.
FB is a website, and you can put there whatever you want or don’t want. It’s like a telephone actually, or a billboaed, you can use it for something incredibly stupid like posting your private parts – or you can use it to communicate with the world in a contemporary way. I for one think that FB is a great thing – if used by great people and in an intelligent way.
Flyer59 wrote:
That’s what always happens in discussions like that. Apple enthusiasts are characterized by other (serious) computer people of “only looking at children’s pictures” on their MAC.
The fact is that most professionals that need computers for more than ordinary office work are not (at least well) supported. Chief exceptions are photo and video editing (where even Apple directly offers appropriate software). A lot of what I do requires Windows. It’s sad but true. Because of this some people run Windows on Macs in virtual machines but it doesn’t always work smoothly.
However, I don’t care for how far Apple went on the hardware front. When they started gluing things (like battery cells) to save some screws and brackets, they crossed a line for me. For me, that last millimeter of thickness and a few decagrams are just not worth it. They are pretty and I like that, but they became decorations. And the last MBP I had (well, it wasn’t actually a single unit, but multiple as I replaced them) really surprised me in a bad way. I always considered Apple to be at the high-end of consumer products and I never expected to get a machine with major cooling issues (when you actually try to use its potential).
Peter wrote:
Nowadays I don’t use RAID and nobody I know who builds machines uses it either. A single drive and a regular backup is the way to go.
As long as you can fit your data and have reasonable room for expansion on a single or maybe two drives, I can agree (possibly counting separately work, family photos, etc.). And before SSDs, I used RAID mostly for performance. In those cases, I would use hardware RAID as I had backups. I learned that losing a controller, even when all drives survive, can cost you your data in high school. Back then I decided to use software RAID for data protection, unless the solution met some criteria I won’t go into here. Not on Windows, I never had confidence in it. BSD or Linux was the way to go for me. And even then I would want at least two machines, exactly because a failing motherboard or power supply could take the whole thing with it.
For sure, Apple owned the DTP market for years. But that changed a long time ago.
One always learns the hard way to do backups; sometimes too late… Nowadays, when I build a PC, I buy two motherboards, two processors, two video cards, two power supplies 
RAID will be useful only if
Nothing beats an automated backup to some other device, at 3am, of everything that matters And a full backup, not incremental. My email database is 3GB now…
A funny observation of the Mac v. Windows thingy: I went on a Lightroom course, run by a pro photographer (of course). He gets calls in the middle of the night from other pro photographers, panicking because they “lost” all their photos. Basically, they “lost” them somewhere in the Documents and Settings directory tree… easily done I never keep pictures under My Pictures. They go into a separate partition ( D: ) and same for videos. Loads of windoze users tear their hair out due to the cavernous nature of that directory tree. On a Mac, this stuff is pretty standardised and leads to a much better usability. Most Mac users I know have no idea where their pictures etc are stored. This way of working probably works because the apps all default to the same place and strongly discourage changing it. It translates to a perception of much higher usability. Android does the same but it is easy to break unless the only pictures on the device were taken with the device’s camera.
The Mac is still the #1 computer in DTP and the creative field, the market share is even higher now.
Of course a Mac is pretty useless in engineering, but that’s not their market.
It’s a bad idea to run W on a MAC in a virtual machine. If i really need W i use Bootcamp with W7 and the Mac starts like any other PC.
With RAID 6 a loss of data is very, very unlikely to happen. And if the box/controller breaks you simply put the disks in a new Promise box – no configuration necessary.
What counts in the end are the results: having not lost one byte in ten years, no viruses and the more human interface does it for me.
A professional pohotographer will never save his pictures in the standard directory. I have been a pro photographer for 15 years – and i never saw that. Only amateurs would do that.
Well, some 90% of “professional” photography today is weddings. The market demands ever fancier weddings and ever fancier packaging of the resulting media.
Whether you call that “pro” is debatable both ways.
The rest is pretty dead… industrial work has been declining for many years. The accessibility of good cameras and the usage of the photos (mostly online; no high quality is needed) has killed it. The photo library business is also dead, as a money earner for the photographer. Action/sports work is still there but you need good contacts to get into it, and many customers rip you off by using the photos without payment.
It’s a bad idea to run W on a MAC in a virtual machine. If i really need W i use Bootcamp with W7 and the Mac starts like any other PC
Not really – there’s no issue unless you need high performance graphics support (DirectX / OpenGL). I can detect absolutely no performance difference at all between running Windows in a VM vs. natively.
Bootcamp is a pain as you have to reboot your machine and pretty much defeats the point.
Peter wrote:
For sure, Apple owned the DTP market for years. But that changed a long time ago.
Yes. From what I remember, they used Macs quite a lot in the 90’s. I deleted that sentence because I wanted to check which program it was and forgot. I don’t really know what they use now, I’m no longer in touch with the people I knew in this field.
One always learns the hard way to do backups; sometimes too late… Nowadays, when I build a PC, I buy two motherboards, two processors, two video cards, two power supplies
Well, I learned in a course in high school. I don’t bother with that. Computers last me usually a very long time. By the time they pack, everything has changed. And if something dies early, replacement usually isn’t an issue. For me, it’s just a waste of money. And when I really need a machine to work, I just buy one from Dell (or HP) with proper support. That too might be a waste of money, but it has worked well over the years. This is another reason I don’t want to use Apple for work – insufficient support.
On a (sort of) funny note, before there were official Apple resellers, one unofficial offered NBD service just like Dell. I think it was provided by the same company. And that was great. However, when they became official, this offer disappeared overnight. I wasn’t pleased about that at all.
RAID will be useful only if
I don’t really agree. RAID 5 or 6 (and some others) work just fine without a single drive and without having the drive mirrored. You just might want to avoid rebuilding the array. And if the disk isn’t new (say, less than 6 months old), it’s about two years old or more, there is a good chance you will lose more in the near future. SW RAID has fewer issues, in my opinion – as long as the drives themselves survive (at least enough of them to rebuild the array), I can recover. I have verified it in practice (granted, simulated, but the hardware was completely different, just the drives were common). Where I’ll sort of agree is that I consider it more important to have at least two arrays on two independent machines (best in two different locations), as I said earlier. Single array, no matter which it is (SW/ HW, whichever level) won’t protect you from failure of common components. Unless we go enterprise grade with drives that support two controllers. And even then there is a risk of a single failure taking out the whole thing, if you are unlucky.
You can use HW RAID to gain performance even with SSDs, but I don’t really see the point since we have PCIe drives available.
I tried all the virtual machines, and hate it all. You never have the same performance.
I just start it with W7, do what i need to do in W, and shut it down asap :-)
