Hi all, from my point of view as a PC user who has research assistants who use macs, i've found that PC/mac compatibility problems do exist. This has caused me quite a few problems as we do a lot of data transfer around our group. I need my students to do work on collaborative projects and enter data into the same programs. While we can all run windows applications, the two are updated at different times, so i've found that features which are available in PC-windows are not available in mac-windows, and have had to find them PCs to work on. Also, my students regularly send me files which my PC reads as gobbledeegook even when the file formats should be intercompatible, I think for the same asynchronous update reason. We tried running windows on their macs using parallels, but the software my university supplies for this didn't work for their particular types of processor.
These problems can probably be easily overcome by those who know about macs, but unfortunately I don't, and don't have time to learn. I think that if anyone gets a mac and need to interact with PC-users a lot, they should make sure they do learn how to get around these problems, otherwise the logistical implications are really frustrating! I hope this perspective is useful to anyone starting a lab group with lots of computer-based processes. Best wishes, Regan -- Dr Regan Early BioMed Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Brown University Providence Rhode Island 02912 USA Office: 401-863-2799 Fax: 401-863-2941 -----Original Message----- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news on behalf of Scott D Lapoint Sent: Mon 8/11/2008 1:47 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [ECOLOG-L] moving from a PC to a Mac??? Hello Ecologers, It's time for me to invest in a new computer. I've long been a fan of Dell computers and PCs in general, but because of the issues I've seen with Vista, I've been considering a switch to Mac. The problems are one, Macs seem much more expensive than a comparatively equipped PC (which is a factor for a graduate student like me), and two, I can't seem to find any one in the ecology field that uses a Mac for work. I was hoping there was someone on this list that uses a Mac to perform GIS analyses, runs statistical packages like Systat or Program R, and maybe how they've found Mac's OS to work with in a field where apparently most of our colleagues are using Windows. Any input would be extremely useful at this stage. Thanks in advance. Scott Scott D. LaPoint Graduate Student SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry 243 Illick Hall Syracuse, NY 13210
