[Info-vax] Happy 25th birthday Macintosh !

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Jan 26, 8:38 pm, DaveG <david.gudew... at abbott.com> wrote:
> My son is into Digital music stuff.  Much (not all) of what he reads
> about and sees in this arena is MAC oriented.  The college he's
> currently attending has all MACs in their labs for this.  We toured a
> school in downtown Chicago recently and all their music and video
> stuff was MAC related.  They did have some PCs, but no where near the
> # of MACs.  That's my humble experience and its certainly not
> exhaustive.  His laptop is a MAC btw.  Many of his peers - ditto.

As I understand it, one of the reasons Windows doesn't sell real well
in the pro music business is the unreliability of the OS. We've
already heard about unreliability on the macro level - the BSOD, when
the OS dies completely - but there's also unreliability on the micro
level - in particular, the inability of the Windows OS to consistently
process data or respond to external events in a timely manner, which
introduces undesired timing variations (jitter) in the output when
Windows is in charge. This applies outside the world of music too; a
datalogging app I'm working on at the moment sees timing variations
commonly in dozens of ms and occasionally up to hundreds of ms. Put a
Linux on the same hardware with the right kernel options and it's
looking like the jitter vanishes.