On Saturday 15 November 2003 08:14 am, T. Joseph Carter wrote: : On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 11:25:03PM -0800, Bob Miller wrote: : > > When Havoc is done with Gnome 2.6, it will have only one button : > > labelled "Do stuff". : > : > You say that like it's a bad thing. Why exactly did you buy a Mac, : > again? well... a person should use whatever computer they like best... If I wasnt paying for it, Id probably have a titanium 15" (or 17")
Although the performance difference between the fastest pc, and fastest mac is really neglegable (either will do the same things just about as fast... ) the mac claiming the g5 is the fastest computer on the planet seemd pretty lame... Heres PC mag's benchmarks... http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1274637,00.asp Looks to me it kind of depends on what your doing... I also read (but cannot confirm) that apples benchmarking was simular to the benchmarking linux/NT a few years back... I see PC's having a much more robust hardware market, and much lower prices (aprox 1/2 the cost of the comparable mac). : : Several reasons (why I bought my Powerbook): : : 1. Ability to actually open Word documents people keep giving me without : them getting annoyed when I tell them that OOo ate the thing. OOo sigh... OpenOffice was a disapointment to me. however abiword or even kword work fine. : 2. The need to not need to fix something every time I have a paper, : project, midterm, or other high-stress school thing pending in order to : complete that thing. (OOo and, under Gentoo, ghostscript were common : culprits, though portions of Gnome were also a factor..) never had a problem with ghostscript either... : 3. Sick and tired of hardware with half-assed support. ACPI-only notebook : that couldn't be suspended in Linux safely, poor battery life because : the speed controls didn't work, four button touchpad which only worked : as two button because there was no driver, softmodems, PCI database, : printer drivers which required annoying long command lines to print at : more than 300 DPI and took 10-15 minutes to print a six page document, : etc. Well.. I can agree with this one, If hardware manufacturers didnt only write drivers for windows, this wouldnt be much of a problem. The trick to this is buy hardware that has either been around long enough for linux drivers to exist. But then again, how many buttons work on your mac pointing device? With a mac, your even more limited by what hardware you can use. : 4. NeXT. The first thing I ever hacked on was an Apple //e. Then a : little on a Mac, then I got a look at a NeXT box. Somewhere I went : back to a IIgs and then wound up with a PC. The NeXT box was the : single best-designed things I'd ever used, and that statement holds : true to date. groovy... so nostalgia is reason to buy a computer? I liked the commodore much better than the apple 2... neither were all that great, but the commodore would boot w/out a disk, which is a decent feature I wish carried over in the modern computing world! The commodore was real easy to program too... incuding sound and color (a big deal 20 years ago), much nicer than my trs-80! : 5. Architecture. I know some 603e-era PPC asm. It's sane. The PPC is a : well-designed processor. IA32 is basically a series of incremental : hacks on the 8080A, which was a pretty lousy processor even then, hence : the high usage of the 6809 and 6502. True... back then motorola made much better CPU's than Intel, Intel based CPU's really havnt made any big advancements, just gotten bigger... : 6. 640 MB RAM, 60 GB disk, USB, Firewire, 802.11g, DVD-R, and Bluetooth in : one small package that gets on average 4 hours battery life, and can be : held in one arm comfortably (I did so with the Gateway often, but it : was never comfortable..) eh... I can find many laptops under $1000 that meet this criteria. which gives you many design choices too... many for 1/2 the cost of the powerbook. If you like light computers, sony makes some really nice ones, much nicer than the powerbook IMHO. If you dont like sony, there are other manufacturers too (such as the averatec (a bit under powered, but can be found for $700)). There are plenty of other options too... I also can run linux, windows, bsd, ... just not mac os. : 7. Price for all of that for me as a student was $1649. NO IA32 notebook : at the time could match the feature set at that price. It's still : nearly impossible to get IA32 notebooks with the featureset integrated : (mainly the DVD-R), but it is now at least possible on $2500-3000 : models. really.... dell will give you a dvd-r free on any of their notebooks... you can get them with most any notebook manufacturer that uses removable bay's in thier laptops... you can even put a spare battery in that slot if you prefer! : 8. Sexy metal keyboard I like that too! and the iluminated panel. : 9. Warranty for 3 years (that was extra, but I didn't have to buy it at : the same time I bought the notebook...) do some reading on the net, there are a lot of unhappy mac buyers, many are diehard mac users that have gotten crappy hardware, and worse support. with the mac, your pretty much stuck with mac support too... Nearest I can tell, mac support and the quality of mac hardware went down the tubes a year or more ago... which is a real shame, as that was where they really shined. : : : Additional reasons for G5: : : 1. Powerbook did its job so well that a Mac desktop seemed perfectly : useful. : 2. PCI-X, AGP 8x, SATA, TOSlink in/out now rather than in 6-12 months. : 3. 7 fans, approximately 30 db total noise. The thing's virtually silent. : 4. Sexy industrial case to match Powerbook : 5. Same 3 year warranty thing applies : 6. Because of the warranty deal applying to the display if purchased with : the machine, I was able to justify replacing my 21" CRT with a 20" wide : aspect LCD. The screen real-estate is about the same, the brightness : scale is better, and the contrast scale is almost as good. The aspect : means less neck strain. Also, while I averaged two headaches a week : using my CRT for long periods, I have not had one computer-induced : headache since I switched to the LCD. (I was expecting a reduction, : not an elimination.) : 7. With probable exception of video card and RAM, two years from now I'm : not extremely likely to feel that my hardware isn't able to do what I : need it to (because it currently can do more than I need it to..) : 8. Replacing my Linux box with a Mac was easy because I basically still : run all of the Linux software that was actually useful. That which was : generally crappy (most of KDE and Gnome) has been replaced by native : MacOS X applications which work better anyway. : 9. Still faster than anything Intel has matching price and features : 10. Did I mention the sexy industrial design? : 11. And the 30db or so? : 12. That I have been a NeXT fan since I was a kid? : : _______________________________________________ : EuG-LUG mailing list : [EMAIL PROTECTED] : http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug -- Note that if I can get you to "su and say" something just by asking, you have a very serious security problem on your system and you should look into it. -- Paul Vixie, vixie-cron 3.0.1 installation notes _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
