OMG, why the hell doesn't Red Hat tell us about this program. Rescued my old DOS/Linux games.
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USB 3.0 and Faster FireWire in Next Mac Pro, iMac?
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OMG, why the hell doesn't Red Hat tell us about this program. Rescued my old DOS/Linux games.
Why would I waste my time watching a blu-ray on something smaller than a 40" screen? My computer is for computing...
I'm curious if the Mac Pro design will change or not.
Hope they just make slight cosmetic changes to the the exterior in order to accomodate the new ports, but completely redesign the interior
Hope they just make slight cosmetic changes to the the exterior in order to accomodate the new ports, but completely redesign the interior
I never was the one arguing that you should be ripping your BD to hard disk space - of course that is nonsense. But let's also be clear - your CD-ROM and Blu-ray-ROM's are not really "archives".
Wikipedia - "Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique, unlike books or magazines for which many identical copies exist."
If your movie collection went up in flames, you'd go to downtown Helsinki and easily replace them at 30 Euro each. Might be a little cash, but nothing that would bankrupt you. On the other hand, if your RAID-5 went up in flames, THAT is when you would need a true archive. How much is 25 GB of your RAID data worth compared to a disk of Lord of the Rings?
Which brings us back to the Mac Pro (the focus of this thread), and the debate about how important Blu-ray is to purchasing decisions. It really falls into three arguments:
1. I want Blu-ray PLAYBACK to watch the BD movies I have already purchased and are sitting next to my computer.
2. I want Blu-ray RECORDING to archive my data for future retrieval.
3. I want Blu-ray RECORDING to create master disks to send off for mass replication.
Argument 1 -playback of mass produced movies. I personally have never had the desire to watch a Blu-ray on my early-2008 MP. I have double 24" monitors (including an Eizo for color proofing) to do my woork, and I'd FAR prefer to use the Blu-ray player attached to my 46" LCD TV to watch a HD movie.
Even if a BTO option for a Blu-ray playback was available, I'm not sure I would spend much for that option. Again, I expect anyone can get a much more capable, independent Blu-ray player for under 75 Euro / $ 100. My mid-range model, complete with Wi-Fi access for Netflix, etc, was under $200.
Argument 2 - Recording optical disks. This was why I responded to your post, which I interpreted as one of a several posts in this thread about using Blu-ray-R disks for archiving critical data. I may have misunderstood, but you said "No matter how you turn it optical media is better for backups and faster and cheaper. Ask National Archive if you don't believe." So I put you in the group of people who makes this second argument, that Blu-ray recordable disks are a great backup strategy. It appears you are more sophisticated in your own approach, but my goal is merely to DISPROVE this incorrect assumption to other readers of this thread.
I personally had several CD-Rs from 2003 fail when I tried to open them in 2008. I generally use top of the line blanks and try to implement my triple backup strategy, but of course these three CD-R's were one of the few that I missed the multiple backups on. I did use numerous, expensive data recovery programs on both mac and Windows to try to recover it, but some was lost forever. I learned the hard way - listen to the professional archivists when they say optical media is not a long-term storage solution...
Argument 3 - Recording optical disks for replication masters. The Mac Pro already ships with an empty optical bay - buy an existing 3rd party Blu-ray recorder for $200 (noted earlier in the thread) to gain this capacity.
I don't have so much loose money that I could buy my movie collection again anytime I want. It took 15 years to buy them and it would take same time to buy them again. It doesn't matter if they are optical disks of files in hdd's.
I personally would like to have ability to watch bd movies with MBP (attached to bigger screen) when I'm not living in my living room. Giving me that option doesn't take anything away from you. Why you are still against it?
Again, there are now much more durable -R's available than generic "2 to 5 years". Different national archives are testing them and in few years will update their recommendations.[/QUOTE]
If you still have those disks, and you haven't tried Ddrescue, give it a try, it's free. Anyway, because of one bad experience, it shouldn't mean that optical discs are bad medium. Like you said, the mistake was that you didn't make multiple copies. Same thing with hdd's. Would you say that hdd's are bad for archiving, if you had similiar experience with them?
And there's big difference in some "generic" cd/dvd-r burning compared to one that has been carefully made with best media and burner and with slowest speed burning and careful verifying.
Anyway, I'd guess that if optical-r's and hdd's were to be used in state-of-the-art archive, they would have same interval in checking their condition. But I'm pretty sure that because "archival-grade" opticals are coming and "archival-grade" hdd's are not, opticals will be preferred in future.
All serious archiving is of course done to tapes and will be for some time.
The real problem with purchased file based collections will be that they won't fit in average consumers time machines. If you can't download them again forever they will loose them. If the DRM goes old, provider goes out of business or whatever (changing the OS or playback device, etc.), they will have to buy them again. So for collections bd is the only choise. Stream/download should be considered as rental.
I lol'ed. At 3:30AM, I lol'ed.
By being a graphics designer. Justified.
Seriously, not everyone LOVES BluRay. I don't, and don't care to.
A' men to that! But it should be offered as an option for people wanting BlueRay.
I wonder how much market share is there for the taking... but Mr. Jobs can't get over the "bag of hurt"...
yes yes, we all want that dont we. its not going to happen.
fine - chuck in a BD writing drive into your mac, grab all your folders you want to archive and burn them to the BD disc. no problem there! macs support this feature out of the box!
easy peasy! go buy Toast Titanium of FCS 3, create your movies in FCP - send to DVD SP and burn to a BD at full 1080p. no problems there either.
I agree.
It seems this board is riddled with people that are willing to spend $1000-$2000 on a computer, but can't afford a $700 TV.
I'll stick to my 46" Samsung for movies, thanks.
or MakeMKV + VLC right now as you have said - too bad VLC is a dog piece of software.
i best get myself an actual BD-ROM drive (ps3 was used previous to rip).
Perian does just fine, VLC just takes less effort opening a stream thats why I say to use that.
makeMKV supports command line options, so using a Cocoa frontend, QT libs + Perian for playback and an NSTask operation for makeMKV. Voila, seemingly integrated BD playback. (On Leopard and Snow Leopard)
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Sucks that the guy who did the PS3 crack had a hissy fit.
thats more of a "workaround" though. people will not want to do that solution, only enthusiasts will. people will still complain until there is a DVD Player.app like solution.
Include the makeMKV and the Perian installer in the MainBundle of the program, that way the user has to do nothing at all and probably wont notice. That second scentence was the program components you would need to use to make such a BD PLayer.app
I had the same thought. I understand the laptop argument a little. I understand the data archive argument a little. The wanting to watch Blue-ray movies on a 27" desktop screen is kind of weird.
There is no hole. £1099 is around $1680 right now. There is a $1699 iMac. On the UK website there are models sitting at £969 and £1225. 1 In the pricing from the Mac mini through iMac to the lower range of the Mac Pro there are no large holes. Right now the $1699 is a C2D, but not refresh it will likely get some Core i processor of some kind.
So the hole can't possibly be a pricing range hole. If talking about squeeze it between model prices inside the range that isn't really a "hole" either. It creates only slightly less buyer issues than with exact price overlaps.
If you want to ignore the iMac and say there is a "hole" between the mini and the Mac Pro. Apple didn't create that hole, you did. That only exists because you are removing the iMac out of the line up.
Apple would be cannibalizing iMac sales. The point you make at the end of that paragraph points to exactly how that will happen.
The switcher campaign had a element of "bring your own keyboard , mouse, and monitor" and switch. So have new, overlapping in price, switch box and customer is presented with two choices if want to move to mid range mac.
1. re-use monitor and buy mini tower.
2. buy iMac ( and prehaps go two monitor)
Your assertion is that no one will pick 1 who would have a taken option 2 if that is were only option. That is extremely weak because your last point says that there should be an extremely high selection of option 1. More people choosing option 1 means less people choose option 2.
The hand waving argument is that magically other people will appear and somehow offset all of the subset of folks that were routed out of option 2 into option 1 with this pricing overlap.
Apple knows they loose some customers because don't have a mini tower. That is not an issue given the choices they have made. 90% of all personal computer buyers don't buy Macs all the time. Every day 9x as many non Macs are sold for every Mac. Not an issue if objective is to not to shrink rather that somehow re-fight the Mac vs Windows war. That war is over. The focus is not on the products they don't sell. The focus is on the ones they do. As long as the number switching in is just marginally higher than those switching out, there is no deep seated problem. Maintaining their 4-6% overall market share is sufficient to make money. The focus is on how not to shoot themselves in the foot in the market they have craved out rather than primarily focus in a contest of pulling users.
There are lots of products Apple doesn't do. They dropped out of the XRaid market. The don't do ruggedized , "toughbooks" laptops. They don't do 2U or 4U servers. They don't do sub $800 netbooks. There is no Mac with an Atom processor , etc. etc. etc. They don't do more variants than they do bring to market.
The closer to the middle of the iMac price range you put the mini-Tower the more destructive the cannibalization is likely to be. The location where would more minimize cannibalization would be at the edge of the iMac price range; not in the middle. A Mac Pro that overlapped with the $2199 CTO iMac would be much less destructive. At that price point folks are a coin flip from going higher/lower and a preference for external monitor and/or need for PCI-e slots (or don't need) can serve more as a tie breaker rather than breaking up or down in the product categories.
Long term the design objective with the iMacs is to increase the I/O so that a large fraction of those who percieve a need for PCI-e slots, don't need them anymore. Additions like USB 3.0 and eventually Light Peak will contribute to making that number go higher. It won't go down to zero but as long as it gets higher that is enough for growth.
P.S. just look at how the MBA sales rocketed down once there was a MBP 13" option. Right now Apple has a problem with how to separate the two. It is less of a problem there because the two share a high number of higher cost components including the display.
There were a couple of responses but this is somewhat indicative of all of them. The common "issue" pushed was to just pile on additional data until saturated the link. Certainly you can just keep adding additional data streams, but that isn't the core issue I was trying to get at.
The primary issue is how many folks need those rates. Average Joe is not doing multi stream uncompressed HD video editing. It goes back to design motivations that lead to Firewire being dropped as the iPod standard interface. The iPod needed to hook to as many computers as possible. Most of them had USB sockets so Firewire got dropped. USB was slower but fast enough and was already ubiquitous. Lightpeak has similar issues to get over.
There were folks back in 2000-2002 also who said "wow" with FW1600 I could pump multiple streams on one wire. Howver, the demand was not so great though that it reach widespread adoption. Can have a standard but if no one picks it up but the subset of users with megabucks to throw at I/O hardware it isn't going to be ubiquitous.
On the extreme video end Extreme Definition video will have issues if start pumping lots of other stuff on same wire. To many devices with isochronous demands on a single connection can cause problems too.
Doing the complete laundry list above on exactly one fiber cable would probably present issues. Either with limitations on the PCI-e connection to the single host or with the controlling software. What is the CPU overhead of being able to do everything for everybody?
I don't doubt LightPeak is going be useful. My doubt is that is going to be universally useful in every way. Going 5Gb/s and higher between boxes probably should on an optical interconnect path going forward into the future.
There is lots of stuff for average users that isn't going to be pushing that envelope that hard. Likewise, there are going to be more uniprotocol solutions that are more vertically oriented (display port, probably a tweak of USB, SATA ) that are going to push their speeds higher also.
Which tests? I've seen several tests on the web that have bad design. For example pulling data from a single spinning hard drive. When the drive used in the benchmark tops out at 100 - 120 MB/s then that really isn't a test of USB 3.0. Perhaps a test of how could attach at least another drive of that speed in a RAID 0 set up and get better result but it isn't testing USB 3.0. More likely need two mainstream SSD drives to even reasonably test the limits.
The second problem is chipset connectivity. The most popular chip being used in PCs so far is the Renesas (formerly NEC) controller. It's interface is a PCI-e v2.0 1x link. That link is only 2Gbps. There is no way going to push full 5Gbps through that implementation if there was no overhead. The amount swallowed in overhead is a fair amount though. To go full throttle would need a 2x lane. This is more for short term design compatibility ( drop in current discrete USB chip with a 1x link. ), than for max performance. Unless pushed the wall won't see the shortfall.
That's one reason some folks are kicking the can down the road a bit to wait for PCI-e v3.0 so can use a 1x link (with double throughput). If going to have stuff like 16x graphics , USB 3.0 , SATA III all getting leveraged at same time going to need better core chipset support for that kind of bandwidth.
Have seen benchmarks results that pegged early implementation of USB 3.0 at 369 MB/s . Theoretically, FW3200 is faster but will have same connectivity issues to the host to overcome versus legacy approaches to connecting and that isn't much of a gap. Still haven't run across any real world FW3200 benchmark numbers anywhere. It is pretty easy to be ahead when haven't done any.
It varies. It is approximated by a 8 followed by 11 month update sequence. Jump to new board/CPU socket on higher end and then move that design across all iMacs models. Then do another "high end becomes low end" shift sliding in new tech.
However, think that also was with a slightly different update cycle by Intel for the CPUS.
On the classic pattern what might see in August/Sept would be Core i across the line up. Speed bumped i5 and i7 quads on the high end and some i3/i5 dual cores likely dropped in on the low end.
However, if suitable replacements for the current i5 i7 on the high end come in with the new "Sandy Bridge" update at the same price points as last year then perhaps might get a new pattern. Move old socket down to "low end" again this year and new board/socket for high end again in November. In short, the iMac might update on 12 month cycle. That would be familiar coming from the iPhone.
It wouldn't hurt much Apple to switch the Mac products to a 12 month update cycle. Even less so if Intel is moving in that direction also. Flip flopping between 8 and 11 just manages to move the date around the calendar over time.
Something like
Feb/March iPad
April/May MBP
April/May MB
June/July iPhone
June/July Mac mini
Aug/Sept Mac Pro & XServe
Sept/Oct iPods
Oct/Nov iMac
Dec/Jan < catch up time
> with perhaps a if not terminated.
Feb/March MBA
Apple should spread the product launches around the calendar year so only have one or two per month and a couple of months off. It will also help even out the revenues over the year just a bit. Technically they haven't committed to specific dates in advance if there is a 2-3 month window targeting.
If Intel drops new desktop processors in late Fall, new mobiles in Jan-Feb , and high end procoessors in late Summer on a yearly basis then that all works out.
I Don't Know About You..
.. But I have tried to rip my BluRays. The ONLY thing that I can find that plays it is Toast's Video Player. VLC Chokes on my Mac Pro. It takes at least 45 minutes to rip, and it takes about another 45 minutes for Toasts video player to load in the resulted movie. 1 hour and 30 minutes just to watch something I should be able to just insert and Watch. RIDICULOUS! Sorry for a platform that used to be so Multimedia friendly and is charging a premium there is NO EXCUSE. I will not upgrade as long as Apple does not support BluRay. I would settle for a third party vendor to create a BluRay DVD Player though. I don't understand how people can make rippers, but they can't make a simple way to watch the thing as it is.
.. But I have tried to rip my BluRays. The ONLY thing that I can find that plays it is Toast's Video Player. VLC Chokes on my Mac Pro. It takes at least 45 minutes to rip, and it takes about another 45 minutes for Toasts video player to load in the resulted movie. 1 hour and 30 minutes just to watch something I should be able to just insert and Watch. RIDICULOUS! Sorry for a platform that used to be so Multimedia friendly and is charging a premium there is NO EXCUSE. I will not upgrade as long as Apple does not support BluRay. I would settle for a third party vendor to create a BluRay DVD Player though. I don't understand how people can make rippers, but they can't make a simple way to watch the thing as it is.