this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
341 points (93.8% liked)
Technology
59629 readers
2808 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not everyone is in that boat - for example in our theatre we have Mac’s with QLab installed and nothing else. They’re not even connected to the internet.
QLab needs about 250MB of RAM.
Oh, and because reliability is critical (it controls large robots that operate heavy fast moving objects in close proximity to humans) we need two of them. They run next to each other with a big red button you can smash with your fist at any time to seamlessly disconnect one and connect the backup.
A bit of money saved by having less RAM is fine with me. We could afford 16GB (or a lot more) but why waste money on that? Especially when one of the Macs will hopefully never be used except for routine testing to check if it works.
QLab doesn’t run on other operating systems and doesn’t really have any viable alternative either. There’s plenty of professional software that doesn’t need a bunch of memory. This one is essentially just a graphical programming tool that allows artistically talented people to do things that would normally require a software engineer.
But seriously - the MacBook Pro has a HDMI port. Apple’s cheaper laptops are too thin for HDMI, so they obviously don’t have one. If all you do is email and meetings - then HDMI is totally worth it and 8GB is fine. It would be nice if protectors around the world switched to DisplayPort (which can run over USB-C) but that’s not the world we live in.
USB-C to HDMI cables are unreliable in my experience. They might work, but sometimes you get weird issues around areas like detecting the supported list of resolutions/aspect ratios and so on.