[geeks] RE: Reevaluating Macintosh (was Dual Xeon vs Dual G4)
Nathaniel Grady
nate at physics.ait.fredonia.edu
Sat Feb 1 22:58:55 CST 2003
On Sat, 1 Feb 2003 19:56:22 -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
> I swore I'd never buy a Mac - but then OSX happened, and EVERYTHING
> CHANGED.
> I *still* think OS9 sucks, but it sucks less than XP or Windows in
> general.
OS7 sucked pretty bad - my high school had macs and it was torturous to
do newsletter layout because opening netscape, pagemaker, photoshop and
clarisworks or word at the same time guaranteed that you would crash
within the next 15 mins. Why did I have this combo opened? I needed
netscape to fetch word docs that were emailed to me, and put the
contents thereof into pagemaker for a newsletter. It was actually
faster to open netscape, save the word docs, close netscape, open word,
save as text, close word and open pagemaker, insert the text document
just because you would reduce the number of crashes. My PC at home
running win 95 or 98 could handle this much better, causing me to swear
never to buy a mac. Well, that and the whole lack of a command line.
Anyway, now that we've established beyond any reasonable doubt that OS7
sucked (*duck*), I had a rather interesting experience when i got to
graduate school last semester. The lab I work in is mostly PCs running
windows (98 for instrument computers, 2k and XP for the rest - two of
us have apple laptops, there's a SS-10 server that everyone uses to run
some custom software critical to the lab doing anything, an ultra-1
that's on loan to me on my desk, and soon a new Dell running linux
(wtf? the unix admin didn't want to buy a sun so i got stuck with a
dell. grrrrr)), which I haven't use for anything serious since doing
page-layout in high school. Matlab on an athlon running XP is slower
than under linux on my 366mhz P-II thinkpad 600e, the machines all
crash and have to be wiped every once in a while, powerpoint can't eat
excel or matlab graphs without barfing, labview freezes, etc... I
started working on a project that needed a data acquisition card and
GPIB, and it just happened that in a currently unused part of the lab
was an "old, crappy mac" that nobody touched with just the stuff I
needed. Compared to recent windows stuff, OS9 absolutely rocked. The
powercomputing power center pro 180 was at least as responsive than the
new PCs running 98, and way more responsive than brand-new 2k or xp
machines, didn't crash as often as the 98 machines (most instruments
need 98 because they haven't gotten programmers who can write NT
drivers), had a nicer interface, tasted better, etc... I was completely
dumbfounded at first - macs had never been worth the plastic they were
cased in when i used them before! Then CS people I knew started
switching to OS X in herds, so i bought a Pismo off ebay. Yum. There
are things about it that I don't like as much as xBSD, solaris or
(gentoo/debian/lfs) linux, things just work. And when it comes down to
it, I'm a physics graduate student and my lack of time has caused me to
fall in love with it. Mail.app is actually more fun than mutt (i swore
I would never use a gui client again after a job forced outlook upon
me), iCal should be able to publish to my linux-based web server using
open protocols if i ever get the free time to set it up, I can use
office to make my prof happy when I don't have the energy to argue that
the LaTeX i sent her was what she really wanted, my favorite unix apps
all work (more-or-less), mathematica is absolutely beautiful, there's a
command line, etc, etc, etc... The ironic part? My molecular biologist
relatives who all used to use macs, are switching to PC's because
they're slightly cheaper and their students were more comfortable with
them, while my "why can't we all go back to VMS" father now says he's
going to ask for a mac instead of a PC for his next computer (he does a
lot of computational physics stuff - the G4 should kick the crap outa a
P4. Now if only apple would get their act together and fix that whole
memory bandwidth thing...).
Sorry this is getting kind-of long. I think I'm going to put it on my
webpage and consider it the first draft of an essay!
http://nate.grady.is-a-geek.com/mac.html Hm, maybe I should make a wiki
or something so we can construct an open-source essay on the topic :)
--Nathaniel Grady
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