[geeks] RE: Reevaluating Macintosh (was Dual Xeon vs Dual G4)

[Nathaniel Grady]

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