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Messages - Phy

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: PC or Mac?
« on: June 22, 2007, 03:40:30 PM »
Quote from: Spriggan on June 21, 2007, 10:31:29 PM
And I disagree with saying that only apple as earned the right to be popular or that everyone else are dishonest, I think that's a rather arrogant or misinformed statement

I agree, that /would/ be an arrogant statement.  Happily, that's not what I said.   ;D

I use both XP and OS X on a daily basis, and can be productive with either.  I have a personal preference of what I /would/ use for my sole platform, but ours is a nuanced world.

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: PC or Mac?
« on: June 21, 2007, 06:27:13 PM »
Quote from: Spriggan on June 19, 2007, 05:56:51 PM
if you run Vista without the graphic enhancements it runs just as fast, if not faster, then XP--plus it's more secure and has better battery management.  Thats one of the misconceptions about the OS.

True you're not getting areo, but with a lap top I'd figure the above would be more important since areo sucks battery life like nothing else.

I'm not a MS apologist, I just don't like it when people don't give things a fair shake and prefer to go off what they heard then from actual experience.

If  you're running Vista without the graphic enhancements, that strikes me as living on the top of a hill overlooking an impressive expanse and then bricking up the picture window to save on heating / cooling costs.  I have to wonder, what's the point?

I run an XP desktop and an OS X laptop.  I much prefer the latter.  I have spent a lot of time with both OS X and Vista laptops.  With OS X, I feel I can have the best of both worlds without the performance hit.

I'm not a Mac apologist, but it is getting increasingly harder to deny the appeal of what Steve Jobs and associates are doing.  I switched over from a Creative Zen to an 80 gig video iPod.  I buy my music through iTunes, and can get DRM-free versions if I so desire.  I've embraced OS X as my OS of choice.  And with any luck, in a couple of weeks, I'll be swapping out my Samsung Blackjack, itself a sexy phone, for an iPhone.  Apple is gaining a lot of momentum, and they're doing it the right way - by earning it.

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: PC or Mac?
« on: June 19, 2007, 03:59:42 PM »
Quote from: Spriggan on June 18, 2007, 08:01:20 PM
are you serious?

All you do is put the XP disk in and tell it to reformat before installing, Best Buy and places like that don't want to tell you how to do things because they charge an insane amount of money (like $150 to look at your PC) for doing things anyone could learn to do.

And I don't know why you'd want to get rid of Vista, it's a nice OS and the majority of complaints I hear about it are from people who don't even use it--but that's how the Internet is, it's cool to hate even if you've never seen or used what you're hating.

If you're on a laptop with a gig or less of RAM, I don't see any way around it - you're not going to get the Vista 'experience', and if you're not going to get that, you may as well run XP, where you don't have the 'new OS blues' troubles that people have with printer drivers, scanner drivers, and so on.

Vista is pretty, but that comes with a price.  XP runs just fine on less RAM and fewer compatibility issues.  Those will be addressed eventually, but the choice should rest with the consumer, not Microsoft.

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: PC or Mac?
« on: June 18, 2007, 06:44:18 PM »
Quote from: Thorgierr on June 18, 2007, 08:23:06 AM
No matter what you get,
Spend some time with the key board and layout of the device.

I agree with this.  I've spent some time on the new MacBook and on the MacBook Pro.  For me, the former keys feel like scrabble tiles and I couldn't get used to the gaps between keys.  The latter feel like what I'm already used to with my aluminum PowerBook, and I like them just fine.

Many of the Windows keyboards were very nice, but just come with Vista (and the Best Buy guy I grilled said that it is deliberately very difficult to wipe the HD and load XP - he said it can be done, but not by a neophyte, and he wouldn't tell me how he did it).

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: PC or Mac?
« on: May 30, 2007, 08:15:47 PM »
You can plug any USB mouse into a Mac desktop or laptop. 

I recently bought a high-end Razer five-button gaming mouse for my Windows rig and plugged it into my PowerBook to see what would happen.

It just worked; no muss, no loading drivers, no fuss.

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: Sanderson's name mentioned with other great Authors.
« on: May 24, 2007, 07:25:15 PM »
They're great, but not 'steller'.   :o  (Gosh, it hurts to write that.)

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: PC or Mac?
« on: May 21, 2007, 06:46:50 PM »
Quote from: Spriggan on May 18, 2007, 05:55:31 PM
I've been using apple off and on since gradeschool and I still can't find where things are on them.

And it's not the big things that take transition time it's the little things like open apple click  = right click (I actually have to carry my own mouse to UVU so I don't have to deal with that), how to find programs you want (why isn't there a freaking start menu?  Oh you're supposed to search for all your applications) that kind of stuff.

When I was a brand-new user last year, I did a little looking around and stumbled across a free program called Quicksilver.

It is the coolest program I've ever used on any platform, and the most intuitive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(software)

Using it is simple; mastering it is beyond me, so I just let it do what I need it to do.

When I open up my PowerBook lid, all I do is press Ctrl+Spacebar, and start typing the name of whatever-it-is I'm looking for.  I don't use the vaunted OS X Dock.  If I want Firefox, I type FI and Quicksilver notes that I've used a number of apps that start with FI, but use Firefox by far the most, so it gives me that as a suggested option.  I press Return and viola!, my app is up and running.

I'd rather start apps with the keyboard than having to find and click them anyway (and especially on a laptop) so Quicksilver not only has served to change the way I do things, it has made my life so much easier that I've never learned any other way on OS X.

There are scads of HOWTO docs on how to get the most out of Quicksilver, but for my purposes, the main functionality is, itself, more than worth it.

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: PC or Mac?
« on: May 18, 2007, 04:52:03 PM »
Quote from: Merlin on May 16, 2007, 08:07:25 AM
For one, I'm a desktop PC user and probably I'd get used to Mac If I have to, but still, the transition period from any OS to another is rather troublesome.

You'd think so, but I was up and running on OS X almost immediately, and found all the basic things I needed to keep in touch and be productive.  I use my Windows boxen at work and at home for publishing our space opera e-zine, but I use OS X for everything else.  I'm soaking in it right now!

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: Offering your Narrative Soup essay on your site
« on: May 04, 2007, 11:59:29 PM »
My one (minor) complaint about the DM archives had to do with the filename convention.  They were sorted by 'DeepMagic_(monthname)(year)'.  That meant that the sorted list showed as:
DeepMagic_April2004
DeepMagic_April2005
DeepMagic_Augustl2002
DeepMagic_Augustl2003...  and so forth. 

My primary contribution was changing the filenames so they can be sorted in order, and then I packaged them back together so others could take advantage of the updated filenames.

The article in question occurs in the second-to-last issue, May 2006.

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: Offering your Narrative Soup essay on your site
« on: May 04, 2007, 08:51:21 PM »
http://raygunrevival.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=485

Deep Magic was the magazine I gravitated to when I first returned to reading sci-fi / fantasy, and it was where I was hanging out when I decided to take revisit a lifelong dream of becoming a creative writer (I'm a tech writer / help author by trade).

The Ray Gun Revival staff all came from the DM forums, and we have all be published over there in one form or another. When were were first developing ideas for RGR, we spent a number of sessions brainstorming with Jeremy, and he was very gracious with his suggestions, opinions, and enthusiasm for our little project. I develop the mag in Adobe InDesign CS2 much as Jeremy developed DM in ID. We publish as a downloadable .pdf as DM did. And so forth. Jeremy has been one of our biggest early supporters and saw other publications more as shieldmates than competitors, and his influence in the early going is impossible to overstate.

When DM announced they were closing their doors, I was curious who would continue to host them going forward to keep the legacy alive.  In the absence of any official archive initiatuive, I downloaded and renamed and combined all the DM issues into one .zip file that includes all Windows and Mac issues. It's 74 meg zipped and nearly a 100 meg uncompressed.

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Brandon Sanderson / Re: PC or Mac?
« on: May 03, 2007, 08:01:05 PM »
I'm a writer.  I write technical and Help documentation by day on Windows machines, and write creative fiction and edit a space opera e-zine online at night on a Mac PowerBook running OS X Tiger.  I was a Windows zealot until I bought the Mac laptop last summer to give OS X a shot.

One can make a compelling argument for either a Windows or a Mac device, therefore, one must go to other considerations to make a decision.

Ask yourself what you'd use the device for.  If you're a hardcore gamer, you /have/ to go PC.  If you're into graphic art design, Mac has the edge (although Adobe CS2 and CS3 are available for both platforms).

I wanted a laptop and an operating system that was cool, easy to use, and fun.  For me, it's Mac and OS X all the way.  With the switch to Intel-based processors, one can now run Windows XP and OS X on Mac hardware, and that's too cool.

I've been a Windows user since Windows 3.1.1.  With that said, I've tried Vista, and it doesn't thrill me.  My current laptop is a Mac, and my next full desktop upgrade will be to Mac as well.

Best wishes with your search.

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