Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/04/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]A few Mac highlights - although easy to use, this is not only a machine for non-techies. 1. The 30" display and associated video card are spectacular. The off-axis color shifts have been reduced from former Apple LCD monitors. A calibrator is essential, as for any monitor. 2. For images over 2GB, one needs a 64 bit operating system and the G5 is solidly there. A Sinar studio camera, or Creo scanner will cheerfully produce images of that size. 3. The Mac operating system is only proprietary on the surface - it is capable of running a lot of open-source software developed for Unix. The standard desktop Mac is really a pretty powerful server and one can run sendmail, MySQL, Apache, etc. Apple probably is now the highest volume producer of Unix machines. It was a pretty nice suprise when I plugged a Mac with a fibre-channel card into a SAN and had it accessing data on, and booting from fibre-channel disks. No special drivers or tweaking were required, it just worked. 4. One can get the source code for most if the operating system, if so disposed. 5. IBM, who manufactures the G5 chip, is a serious contender with Intel in the microprocessor realm. John