…While I was searching for some related stuff I found this post…

2.) [...]haha this was one funny post. I laughed when I read it.[...]…

A good 20% of my tech time at work is me being called over by some baffled co-worker who wants to know “Why is it doing this?” Most of the time, I admit I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I tell them the computer is confused, and that’s why you aren’t getting work done, so reboot and see if that fixes it.

They do and it does.

I’m getting paid to do that at work. At home, working on my cat advice website… not so much.

I don’t have these problems at home.

By contrast, I’ve lots of friends who have gone through more PCs than I have Macs, and it’s not because they’re retiring those machines voluntarily. It’s because something has gone so horribly wrong that they’re forced to buy something new. It really goes to prove the old adage that you get what you pay for. So, I think the BMW/Yugo comparison is apt. It’s like buying a cheap pair of tennis shoes from Wal-Mart just to save money versus buying a good pair of Nikes from Foot Locker that will last three times as long.

At work, with PCs so ubiquitous, I’ve used only PCs. However, I work in the cellular industry, maintaining switching equipment. Every PC has had some version of UNIX installed. And if they weren’t PCs, then they were Sun MicroSystems workstations, or even Silicon Graphics workstations. But all ran UNIX. The only PCs at work that run Windows are those used for email.

I can remember once talking to the head of the IT department for a company I was working for a few years back, and I was astounded to hear her say (and I’m not kidding here) that she was actually FRIGHTENED! by the reliability of the Mac OS.

Because I’ve chosen to use Macs at work, I can add to my resume that I’m not only familiar with PCs and Windows and UNIX, but Macs, as well. While Macs are not the primary machine found in the offices of cellular companies, they are found there, and when I can show that I am versed in UNIX, Windows, and the Mac OS, that tells an employer that I’m flexible and that I can learn new things easily. So, there’s more to Macs than just increasing one’s productivity. In my case, I think it’s also increased my marketability when it comes to looking for work.

Apple doesn’t per se, limit the size of hard drives. One can always upgrade their hard drive size and hard drive sizes are blossoming in ever larger sizes but most folks don’t RAID 5 on the boot drive. They’d use external hard drives for that or if you did go with a Mac Pro Tower, you could add a couple of Terabyte drives and raid those through a software raid. Software raid is not the most effective solution though which is why most media folk working with large files would be working with external raid storage. There is a wide range of reasonably priced external hard drives/raid arrays that are designed to be used in a variety of RAID configurations and many of these are configured with the photo and video professionals in mind and offer great tech support. Check out: http://www.powermax.com/cats/disp/storage

Wow, I missed the part about the manufacturers calling a halt to producing point n shoots over 5 megapixels! Interestingly, there are loads of so called point and shoot digital cameras that offer well over 5 megapixels, well up into the 12 megapixel range by all the major camera manufacturers and you can find them here at Powermax. There’s lots of choices but check out this one:
http://www.powermax.com/parts/show/q07288

And it’s true that these incredibly large files sizes and RAW files eat up all kinds of gigabytes so for sure there are ongoing discussions on how to archive files but again, one rarely stores files long term on your main hard drive when you are working with files of that magnitude. Many photo and video professionals are looking at Blu-Ray as an option for long term storage.

Why does Apple limit the size of the hard drive for it’s users and doesn’t offer a terabyte RAID 5 array for video and the new DSLR cameras that put out at least 25Mb per RAW shot plus up to 15Mb of JPG at the same time?

That eats up disk space pretty fast, not to mention saving the fixed up RAW files in addition, so your looking at possibly 100Mb per shot. That is what the entry to the DSLR market is offering for a 12.2 MPixel camera. They do have a 15MPixel camera, and a PCMCIA Type II hard drive is required for it, not a memory chip.

Professional DSLR photography is beginning to be so disk intensive that manufacturers have called a halt to the CMOS density at 12.2MPixels. There is nothing between the top of the line point and shoot 5MPixels that generate JPG only and the 10MPixels of last year’s DSLR model.

So when you make that jump into the DSLR line, you have to be prepared with ample disk space. The editing software works on a Mac and PC. So if it’s going to be disk intensive, I’d rather have a RAID 5 array to handle it. RAID is a very proven technology that lets you get away with not backing up files so often since there’s a backup built into it anyway.

This probably means that I would have to get a Mac Pro to do what I need to do and pay exorbitant prices for Mac RAID capability – if it exists. In this case, I’d rather go the PC route since the price would be substantially cheaper because I can get the RAID equipment at Fry’s Electronics and put it in myself with money left over to buy a standard Mac too.

I hear all the video people using Macs for production and postproduction. Sure MPEG files are nowhere near what DSLR RAW files will take up, Where are you going to be getting the needed disk space from? 250Gb is not enough to hold DSLR plus everything else. Am I missing something about the Mac Pro’s storage capabilites? I’m sure I’d love to have the new 192 core graphics card to speed things up as well and that has it’s own requirements on either system.

Here is what always surprises me in the whole Windows-versus-Mac debate. Mac OS X is Unix. Unix is a big deal yet this is seldom talked about. It is bulletproof, time-tested and has an excellent pedigree, e.g AT&T, Bell Labs, C, Kernighan & Ritchie et al. Unix is the grandaddy of mainstream enterprise-level OSs.

Conversely, Windows on top of MSDOS was conceived as a single-user GUI to compete with the likes of GEM on top of DR DOS. Reality is that Windows was pushed into the enterprise from this starting position for marketing reasons, and this is why Windows has more demonstrated security holes than Unix which was born in and for the enterprise.

I could do that with a windows base facility?