The regular DVI-only 27" Apple LED CinemaDispaly and its Thunderbolt counterpart are the same price. Both have a MagSafe connector for Macintops. My biggest complaint with Apple monitors (besides the wonky colors and narrow gamut due to the white LED backlighting) is that they only have one input. That is unacceptable on a $1000 monitor. Eizo makes a variety of 27" monitors, all are CCFL-backlit. They range in cost from $1700 to over $3300. If that's too pedestrian for you, they have a 30" that's over $5000. They are also capable of displaying gamma 1 point fricken 0. I am seriously in the market for an Eizo, and already have the kidney on eBay to pay for it. I'm not buying anything until the new MacPros are out and I know exactly what type of connectors their video cards will have. In the interim, I'm going to buy this LG IPS display to tide me over. It's got a native resolution that my humble early 2008 MacBook can drive and about as good color accuracy as one can expect for under $500. Blissfully, it has 1 DVI, 2 HDMI and one VGA input.

11" MBA has shipped finally. Now I just have to wait a week for it to get here from China.

Does anyone know of any way or any utility to disable the damn Lion multi-user login? It's driving me totally fucking insane! Stupid ass 'feature' is basically fucking almost every VNC app out there. Even though I turned off quick user switching, it still seems to do it randomly and then logs on as another user and promptly dumps all my normal startup items... including the various app servers like stream to me, remoteVU, mouse servers, splashtop remote etc. and if it dumps me back at the login screen only one of about 20 tries will even let you enter a pasword. Mostly it just freezes.

I wanna kick Jobs in his wrinkly little balls right now.

AnandTech explains the difference as this, Thunderbolt in the 2011 iMac, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini support 4 bidirectional 10Gbps channels and support for up to two DisplayPort monitors.

So I think you can just do 2 27" monitors + your built in display, shel, if you get a macbook pro, or 1 on a macbook air

OK, well I suppose 3 27" displays is a little too much real estate anyway.

Another question: For those of you who use gmail on Mac OS X Chrome, do the keyboard shortcuts for gmail work for you? They work on Firefox but not Chrome which seems kinda silly.

I have been moving away from using Apple Mail to using web-based gmail since I want some decent search capabilities (which seem to be limited in Apple Mail if you don't download messages to your harddrive) and not have to download my SPAM mail to all of my computers (which is about 9000-10000 messages a month). I am tired of clicking on individual messages to read, select or delete them (and would prefer to use Chrome instead of FF or Safari). If this won't work, is there a way to set up gmail/imap on Apple mail so that it downloads all messages except SPAM?

the gmail shortcuts work for me in chrome on my macs.

I just tried it again and now they work.

Please ignore my other message. I will still be interested to know if there is a way to have all mail downloaded except SPAM messages in Apple Mail.

yes, you can definitely control which mailboxes are visible via imap, as I pick and choose mine, lemme see if I can dig up how.

Found it:

Advanced IMAP settings

I want to control which labels to sync

You can choose to sync only specific folders in IMAP rather than all of your messages, which can help speed up the process. Visit your Labels tab of your Gmail settings, and use the 'Show in IMAP' checkbox next to each of your labels to choose which will be synced. When you uncheck the box next to a label, the corresponding folder will disappear from IMAP.

Thanks Dan.

I downloaded Lion and made a bootable DVD copy of it but I am not sure I want to install it yet.

^ FWIW, I've had no real issues with Lion on my MBP. The only issue I initially had (wifi not connecting quickly to service when waking up) went away when I changed the order of priority in the preferences.

I know SPSS doesn't work under lion, other math related products might be similarly hampered

That is probably a good thing as SPSS sucks.

hey hey hey...at least its better than s+

I pretty much only use Sage nowadays and I can run it on our server so that it not so much of a problem.

I use SAS for mainstream stuff and R for not-so-mainstream stuff. Parallels 6 has a nice iPad app for remote connections.

Am I the only one that still uses mathematica? I feel alone.

R is quite nice.

Either of you use magma? Has the craziest number precision of any software I have seen. Can deal with numbers that makes C++ cry. Extremely pleasant to use for crypto stuff.

I got pissed at Mathematica because of the way they do licensing so I stopped using it completely. I would use Mathematica every so often and pretty much ever time I wanted to use it, the program would tell me a needed to get a new license.... Also, Sage is faster than Mathematica. As for MAGMA vs Sage, I am sure that MAGMA does things that Sage doesn't but so far isn't anything I need to do. Even though Rice has a license for MAGMA at this time, I would rather not be tied to a software program that is so costly. (Sage was developed as an open source alternative to MAGMA.)

surely you are aware of this but just in case...

http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/calc/

also, i hate the guy who did the departmental presentation for sage when it came out so i hated sage by proxy. perhaps i should be a bit more rational in my approach to evaluating mathematical packages but what fun would that be

Edited July 31, 201114 yr by crappyjones123

I didn't know about that, thanks! Unfortunately, the "Calculations are restricted to 60 seconds" comment on the bottom of the page is pretty restrictive. Not sure I run any examples that finish that quickly.

Took the flying MacBook Air into the Apple store for a check up and the Genius just gave me a new one. I am back to a new laptop and happy.

Not sure if this affects the multi-monitor questions, but...

Apple using smaller, cheaper Thunderbolt controller in MacBook Airs http://j.mp/o2c0Ll

Nice, Jeff! I wonder if they'll give me a new MacBook if I brought my ancient broken MacBook.

Nice, Jeff! I wonder if they'll give me a new MacBook if I brought my ancient broken MacBook.

How's your Command Presence? Jeff could have brought in a 10-year-old ThinkPad and still left with a new Macbook Air.

I have one of those...oh hey Jeff what's going on