Dell Studio Hybrid Desktops

Enderle is a hack shill whose "quotes" are blatant propaganda for the companies that employee him as a consultant. He's also clearly an obsessed Apple basher that doesn't mind outright lies (such as claiming that Microsoft wrote large portions of the original Mac OS).

John, "The PC world beats the mac on choice. This we can't deny." Right. It's not that Macs are inherently that expensive anymore if what you want is exactly one of the models they offer, it's that given the tiny number of configurations, for almost any configuration you're going to have to buy a lot of things you don't need to get the ones you want.

"Now if you're seriously going to argue that these fall under the category of "halfway decent video cameras", then YOU are clearly the one enjoying crack with your moosemeat, eh?" "I tell everyone I know to buy tape-based camcorders for their home movies. " "As do I. Tape is cheap, durable, and proven." BWAHAHAHAHAH!! That's the funniest thing I've read all day. "And those tapes aren't going to crash and lose all the video" No, they just degrade. While sitting on a shelf. All by themself. Not making a backup is just stupid, and well-stored optical media is the best option. Archived hard-drives are either second, or first, depending on your belief of "optical disc rot". I would place tape last on my list of choices for archive media. Well let's just take a look here....Sony has exactly 2 tape high-definition cameras with i.Link, and one is a pro[sumer] cam over $3000. http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catal... Hmm....only 2 decent cameras with "i.Link". Guess that blows your theory all to horseshit, losta. "Still, it's not as fast as eSata, which offers native speeds, but I'm unaware of any mainstream PCs or notebooks that ship with eSata ports..." Sorry, but you need to get out of your Mac shell. eSATA is shipping on PC's as standard gear nowadays. "Of course, the fastest compact flash card reader is.... firewire 800 from sandisk." Sorry, but it reads at a sad maximum of just 40MB/sec. That's only Firewire 400 throughput. Just because it has an FW800 port doesn't mean it actually uses it. Methinks the only reason they put a 1394b port on it is just to support connectivity to those ports (which as you know, is a different plug type to 1394a). eSATA is 3.0Gbps maximum. eSATA is just an external version of SATA2 (NCQ and all). Hard drives already far exceed the maximum 45MB/sec speed of Sandisks matching CF cards to that FW800 card reader you spoke of. RAID is even faster, since host controllers run SATA each as a separate channel. If you really want to argue speed, you should do your homework.

"Whatever. That debate is lame. Use whatever suites the work you do." I was amazed at how the Mac bashing crowd cheered in joy when USB2 came out because, on paper (and only on paper), it was speedier than Firewire. I mean, who cares about stupid ports enough to either hate or love them? "Archived hard-drives are either second, or first, depending on your belief of "optical disc rot"." Disc rot is really not a question of belief, as isn't the high price of dvd storage (they require a lot of space and time).

"The pros use LTO-3 tape" ....and that's why Red uses it eh? ....or rather, that must mean you're not a pro. "isn't firewire the main transport for all DV and HDV camcorders? Those are the two strong standards for consumers and low-end prosumers." Yes, and since when have you seen any HDV consumer cameras lately? DV is on it's way out. HDV is extremely inefficient too with other formats using higher-efficiency codecs. "firewire 400 effectively peaks at around 35MB/sec in the real world, hence the sandisk move to 800 for their high performance reader" For 5MB/second more??? BWAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, but in the "real world" nobody would buy that story. *REAL WORLD* SATA2 hard drives operate at double that. RAID 0 is even faster. 1394b can't keep up with that. Sorry. "http://standards.ieee.org/announcements/ieee1394.html" USB 3.0 already trumps that at 4.8Gbps, and SATA 6Gbps is just around the corner.

As a curious aside, DAT tapes tend to "stretch", for want of a better word. Because professional DAT players use a helical scan method, and consumer DAT players use an axial, or radial scan, I forget the correct term, consumer players therefore have a better chance of playing stretched old DATs than professional machines. Which is why lots of professional studios used to spec consumer HiFi grade DAT machines. Also, the best archiving method for professional audio was analogue tape. As long as they're stored sensibly, you can still play very early tapes even today. The trouble with modern digital workstations is that there's doubt over their file formats. Will we still be able to open Protools sessions in 50 years time, for example? anyway, sorry to interrupt the insane arguments. carry on.

"....and that's why Red uses it eh? ....or rather, that must mean you're not a pro." Um... RED makes cameras (which shoot to compact flash or hard drive). They don't use them in the field beyond testing, so what are you even saying? But their premiere production company partner, Off Hollywood Digital, who received their first two cameras out of the gate and I've been using to run the productions on my commercials archives all their projects to LTO-3A tape. And that's the point. Long term archival is best done with tape right now. Not drives. Not optical media. Tape. Period. And I hate tape... but it's just the reality. "For 5MB/second more???  BWAHAHAHAHA.  Sorry, but in the "real world" nobody would buy that story." It's actually more like 10MB/sec moving from Firewire 400 to 800 on the card reader. That's a 30% speed boost in the field. So... a 16GB flash card will take 7.6 minutes at 35MB/s and 6 minutes at 45MB/s. When you're on the set, a set that costs $100K for one day of shoot, cutting transfer time by 30% is worth $80. That you claim that "nobody" would buy that is just arrogance compounding ignorance. "*REAL WORLD* SATA2 hard drives operate at double that.  RAID 0 is even faster.  1394b can't keep up with that.  Sorry." At what point did I dispute SATA2 being the fastest connection? Oh, that's right. I didn't. And blather on about USB3. USB2 doesn't even come close to it's 480Mb/sec and is much slower than Firewire 400 in reality. Reality is all that matters, not vaporware spec sheets.

I agree the new Dell Studio Hybrid seems like a viable solution. Even in the workspace. We're looking at it as a replacement to our desktops. It's just dual monitor support is lacking. Then again Dell didn't design this to target business.