You still have a NeXT machine? Which model? May I visit and be
permitted to drool on it?
A cube. Of course! It has a serious Y2K problem, and the OS upgrade
was prohibitively priced for my needs at the time. So, it's just
stuck in the 90's. The synthesized string engine in the DSP was
truly stunning to me, in its day.
does it do anything a mac doesn't do?
Now? No, not really. It does PostScript Level 2 really really well,
though.
molasses fresh from the fridge, but they were a cool machine. The laser
printer was a lobotomized LJ2/3 (Canon SX engine). With the straight
paper
The printer was a 400 dpi variation, would also do 300 dpi. It was
'odd' in that it used a serial video DMA connection to the motherboard,
all rendering was done by the main CPU. (No processor in the printer
except for an 8-bitter that ran the motors, etc.) Part of the Display
Postscript system the NeXT used. Really pretty fast, it was.
I use a Sony Mavica for photography which burns to a mini-cd. Works
fantastic whether you use Windoze or Linux. Apparently won't work on a
Mac because OSX can't read the CD. Most folks there keep a cd in their
drive bay so they have an icon which they can click and (hopefully)
eject their CDs, because once the CD is out and the icon leaves the
desktop it may or may not open the drive bay and may or may not read
the
next CD.
Odd that Mavica disks aren't readable, but that's hardly an indictment
of the entire platform. I would also want to try one out in an external
firewire/usb drive as well, just to be sure it wasn't something to do
with the actual drive that's inside. (Not made by Apple, either.)
Word on the Mac has the quaint habit of deleting files on the server
rather than saving when you attempt to save changes to an existing
document. There is no fix for this shite. I could go on.
Again, you're using Word, one of the biggest POS programs out there,
to indict a platform? Do _not_ try to use Word in a workgroup situation
for large documents, _unless_ you have an active and capable IT
department
backing you up. You _will_ be sorry. Safest not to use it at all,
really.
I loathe the POS, it has cost me a _lot_ of time over the years.
i just need a mac with a pcmcia card or equivalent and i'll never look
at a
windoze machine again
Pismo! My wife and I got a brace for Christmas. I named hers Pismo,
and mine Hismo. Mine is parts-on-the-hoof for hers. They are only
400 or 500 MHz, but that's fairly quick anyway. Some had G4 upgrades.
My wife's is running the latest release, 10.4, I'm on 10.3 'cause I
don't have quite enough memory to make 10.4 happy. Hers has airport,
mine has some weird aftermarket PCMCIA card. Hers works fine, mine
has problems going to sleep and waking up, I often have to yank the
PCMCIA card to get it to come back up. But I can then just put it
back in and be back on the house network, so it's really only an
inconvenience. I could put Airport in, but why spend money on a
parts box?
-- Jim
