There's one piece of software that does not run on a Mac.

GRAPHent

I tried some years ago to port it to a Mac without success, that's the only 
reason I have a dead PC (*technically it has Windows on it but I call it dead 
as long as no linux is installed) in my office waiting to get some flavor of 
linux since about 1 year. As under linux I never had troubles compiling it.

Regarding $ US versus Europe

How frequently do you change your linux boxes ?
I'm still running a Mac Laptop from 2004 which I bought for 2500$, only thing I 
had to do is replace the hard drive as the shipped 120 GB was way to small for 
my needs. It now sports a 500 GB drive and runs 10.6. So considering it's been 
running for 7.5 years now that brings the cost down to ~340$/year. I'm 
anticipating to use that Mac at least for another 3-4 years before I think it 
served my purposes well. Then in it's afterlife it will function as guest 
computer for people visiting us from Europe :-)

A Mac mini with Zalman serves as stereo workspace together $1000, has been 
running three years now and it will surely continue to run for a few more 
years. Sure I also have the MacPro's there the $-tag is much higher but you 
also get a few more cores for your money and not everybody needs one of those 
monsters.

Jürgen


On Sep 29, 2011, at 10:55 AM, Dima Klenchin wrote:

Simon Kolstoe wrote:

Meanwhile I think windows is slowly improving as a crystallography
platform - and Microsoft is perhaps no longer hated in principle - however
the one student in our lab who opted to go the windows route seems very
limited in the software he can run.

I have a feeling that the lack of Windows software continues to be mostly
due to the irrational animosity toward it rather than the platform-specific
issues. After all, there seemed to be many  developers who were happy to
code for MacOS 7-9 but refused to release anything that runs in Windows.
Meanwhile, that is the only platform we never hear about installation and
dependencies issues. Given the large number of Windows versions of CCP4
downloaded, I assume this is not because nobody actually installs Windows
software.

- Dima

......................
Jürgen Bosch
Johns Hopkins University
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute
615 North Wolfe Street, W8708
Baltimore, MD 21205
Office: +1-410-614-4742
Lab:      +1-410-614-4894
Fax:      +1-410-955-2926
http://web.mac.com/bosch_lab/





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