Windows 7 Laptops Ridiculously Cheap Right Now

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I found that anyone who is a photographer really wants to have a Mac. The screen is like the viewfinder in a Zeiss 35.... Brilliant with no comparison.
 
At about the time of the Mac, I bought a Zenith Z241, 6Mhz 80286 with 80287 co-processor. The Motorola coprocessor was late by several years. Upgraded the Z241 to a 16MHz 386 for a "mere" $1000. Added an 80387, then a Cyrix coprocessor. Took all the parts from the upgrade, bought an empty case and power supply, used the old parts to rebuild the Z241. Made a parallel cable to connect the two computers via the parallel port, and programmed the Z241 to be a graphics accelerator with an IBM PGC, 640x480 256 colors circa 1984. Added an Orchid PGA, which used an 80186 for a graphics coprocessor. The Orchid did EGA nd PCG, you hooked two screens to it. I had three screens for my setup, all under my control. Used it for image processing. I used a similar setup for stop-frame animation using a Panasonic TQ-2026 Laser video disk recorder. that thing cost $25K. When I saw co-workers attempting to write code for a MAC II- yeah, right.
 
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whitecat said:
I found that anyone who is a photographer really wants to have a Mac. The screen is like the viewfinder in a Zeiss 35.... Brilliant with no comparison.
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Gosh. After around 45 years of photography, 15 years of Photoshop-and-scanning, 10 years after trying my first digital camera (and deciding to wait until they were usable), and well over half a decade of running digital cameras, it comes as a bit of a shock to learn that I'm not a photographer. I'd be grateful if you didn't tell my editors, as they might stop running my pictures.

Seriously, yours is the kind of insupportable overstatement that gets Mac users a bad name. Yes, I've used Macs. In fact I gave away my last Mac a few weeks ago, because I hardly ever used it. I've also used mainframes, and 'portables' going back to the days when they were the size of a suitcase with tiny CRT screens. Stick a good screen on just about anything, and it works. It's just that some are faster (and easier to use) than others.

Cheers,

R.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
At about the time of the Mac, I bought a Zenith Z241, 6Mhz 80286 with 80287 co-processor. The Motorola coprocessor was late by several years. Upgraded the Z241 to a 16MHz 386 for a "mere" $1000. Added an 80387, then a Cyrix coprocessor. Took all the parts from the upgrade, bought an empty case and power supply, used the old parts to rebuild the Z241. Made a parallel cable to connect the two computers via the parallel port, and programmed the Z241 to be a graphics accelerator with an IBM PGC, 640x480 256 colors circa 1984. Added an Orchid PGA, which used an 80186 for a graphics coprocessor. The Orchid did VGA nd PCG, you hooked two screens to it. I had three screens for my setup, all under my control. Used it for image processing. I used a similar setup for stop-frame animation using a Panasonic TQ-2026 Laser video disk recorder. that thing cost $25K. When I saw co-workers attempting to write code for a MAC II- yeah, right.
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I was able to fix a clock radio once ... does that admit me to your club?

:p
 
Did the clock radio use Nixie Tubes... Or Digital Tumblers...

You're In.

I have a calculator from 1968 that used Nixie Tubes and a card reader. Cost as much as a 1968 Shelby GT500 Mustang.

Core memory, about the size of a briefcase.
 
You guys are funny. Leica vs non-Leica, Mac vs PC, it all sounds the same :)

Double Negative said:
Nice. Yes, this was SJ's company while he was ousted from Apple. Intended for the educational market. Turns out, Tim Berners-Lee created the WWW on one... The NeXT OS basically formed Mac OS X. The first versions (the betas and Rhapsody) looked nearly identical to it. Remember, a big part of NeXTstep was the APIs, etc. and the underlying part of the OS was ported to SPARC, Intel, etc. So it was easy to run it on PPC. This was around 1999-2000. In 2001, Mac OS X 10.1 came out, standing all on its own.
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Let's get one thing straight: NeXTstep and Mac OS X are based on FreeBSD, which was developed and ported to different platforms independently of Jobs. Apart from that, NeXTstep with its Postscript interface and Max OS X are quite different beasts.

The biggest strength of the Macs is just that, the underlying UNIX. No blue screens.

The biggest strength of Windows is invisible to most here, it's the Microsoft C++ development environment.

For laptops, I myself have been using Thinkpads since almost 20 years, only half by choice. Running Linux, either natively or via vmware. Our developers use Linux or Windows machines, a couple have Macs, depending on the mood. Depending what you pick, you gain some, you loose some. Nobody argues which is better.

Roland.
 
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I use both PC & Mac, both have advantages and weaknesses. If I had to have only one computer, I'd get a Mac as you can run Mac OS X and Windows if you want.

Mac OS X is the reason to get a Mac, the hardware itself is just a matter of taste between that and high end PC.

Some may feel that Macs are a rip off and some feel they are worth the money, it only matters how you feel about it really, I'm amazed at how passionate people still get over the PC vs. Mac thing.
 
Double Negative said:
Heh, NT 4.0 was the last Windows I actually used (and mostly for 3D Studio Max). SGI... Now we're talking. I picked up an Indigo2 High Impact (the purple Barney box) back in 1997 or thereabouts - still have it. What's amazing is how well it handles OpenGL with the dedicated hardware... Still blows away anything I've seen today - and this was nearly 15 years ago! Ahh, Irix... Have to say, the Magic Desktop (4WM) was... Unique. SGIs were similar to Macs in a lot of ways (or vice versa). Real shame what became of SGI in the workstation market. Luckily I never bought into the O2, Fire or Tezra workstations - as nice as they were.
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I used to drool looking at those SGI Indigo's at the mechanical engineering lab. Then I got an on campus job using one of those at the Vet-Med lab.
 
My preference would have been a BeBox.

I still have a copy of BeOS R4 lying around. Now that was an operating system. The demo where you would drag three video files on the surfaces of a rotating cube (and the OS would display all three at once at 25fps) always left people with their mouths open.
 
We had a Connection Machine 2 and later a Connection Machine 5 at the Lab, but i never used them.

I had a personal Intel Hypercube with 4 attached array processors. Cool personal computer.

I generated fractal based imagery with it.

Sometimes I really miss doing image processing with parallel vector computers.
 
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I used a 1k node CM5, a 64 node Intel Paragon (i960-based), a 1k node Fujitsu AP1000 (Sparc), and a 64 node Intel iWarp, Brian; in all cases sitting for a week or so in rooms next to the computer rooms. I also was the first to port and use C++ (cfront) onto the Cray XMP. Those were the times ....
 
Geek Fest 2011.

I'm just happy to get paid to write code.

30 Years ago I was using the Internet to connect to the Supercomputer to do my Computer Science homework. And get paid to write code.
 
with all the cyber brain power on here - are any of you working in the econophysics world? Just curious.
 
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