I bought a brand new iMac on Tuesday. I'm pretty sure this will come as a surprise to some, so I figured I might as well offer some background information about this choice - maybe it'll help other people who are also pondering what to buy as their next computer.
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Member since:2009-08-18
Member since:2006-02-15
I don't know anything about Macs, really, but it does sound like something people have been having issues with. I do not know why, like e.g. if it is just something people have screwed up themselves or if it has been some sort of an issue with OSX itself.
On my Windows PC I've been playing 1080p games on my primary screen and 1080p videos on the secondary screen for a while now without so much as a hiccup, and under Linux I remember having watched some videos on a secondary screen while a compilation was going in on the primary screen like about 10 years ago -- granted, the video was not 1080p back then, but CPUs weren't as powerful either.
Member since:2007-11-11
Heck my PC is running a 2 year old AMD Hexacore I paid a whole $110 for and an HD4850 which I got for less than $50 off of Geeks and I can do full 1080P WHILE doing a video transcode and having a chat window open and not skip a beat, there has been many a time I've been transcoding a video to DVD in the background while playing a game, nary a hiccup.
So yeah...1080P...My GF's $300 AMD triple core with HD5450 does that just fine while she checks her FB, so not really a big whoop anymore. Heck even my $350 EEE E350 netbook will do 1080P over HDMI without skipping so I'd say that should pretty much be the LEAST you should look for in a system.
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2008-04-08
Interesting... I have a early 2006 Intel iMac (original Intel iMac, CoreDuo 2GB) that I run two displays on and can do 1080 movies while developing on the other screen. The movies never hiccup! I keep hoping that it will die so I can talk the boss into letting me purchase a nice new 27" iMac. drool, drool, but it keeps on going :/. Almost 7 years old and still a great machine.
If you don't think the "independent" store sales/tech reps will fill you full of BS, you are naive. They probably know you will "trust" them more if they talk "honestly" about the product they sell. They are still slimy sales folk.
Krreagan
Member since:2006-05-30
It is for Mac OS X, which was my point
. " Really? What was the last Intel Mac you used before this current one? My late 2007 Macbook can do the same and it has a 2.2GHz core2Duo and 4GB of RAM. It can also do low latency audio, which none of my Windows laptops can handle without using the special ASIO4ALL driver that hacks ASIO support.
Member since:2008-08-23
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2005-07-06
and that's something special?