As Chip Louie once said, > Hi Jim, > > Well I'm thinking about buying a 2GHz. DP G5 just to see what all the devout > MAC worshipers are making such a fuss about. I have a friend who bought one > a few weeks ago and in my short casual use with PS7 on her system I can't > say that I'm impressed one way or the other except for what appears to be > the very high price she paid for the whole system. Being a UNIX consultant > it would be educational to see what they have done to UNIX. I've owned > Apples and MACs in the past but generally they were too slow and limited in > options and software. Of course this is from a hardware/software guy who > has been designing and playing with small systems since the Altair 8800 came > out. Anyway based on what I've seen so far a DP 2GHz. G5 is a strong > performer in some areas and pretty weak in others. It seems that an DP > Opteron or DP 3GHz. Xeon with a decent 3D card, adequate system RAM and a > two or three drive stripe across 10K SATA spindles, even in the current > slowish 1st gen mobos should handily beat a 2GHz. DP G5 in real world > application.
The reason we use OSX laptops (over Windows and Linux) in our production engineering group is for the strong unix support. It is heavily BSD-based and you can just run all the standard utilities that you expect to find on any other unix based system (man, X, perl, mtr, gcc, etc.) The integration of Unix into the OS (it being a core part of it) feels (to me) tighter than what you would get with say, the Cygwin environment on the PC. And the integration on the UI side with applications like MSFT Office (which makes things just that much easier when dealing Windows users in a corporate environment) is preferable to linux (once again, IMHO). You could really achieve the same thing from a unix standpoint with a Windows, Linux or OSX laptop (or desktop, though with OSX, the laptops are beautifully designed and just generally work well, other than the trackpad), but each has its tradeoffs. I am generally ok with the "can't find application XX" (vs. Windows) and "slower/$$" (vs. anything Intel) tradeoff instead of what I perceive as usability tradeoffs (For instance, using OpenOffice, AbiWord or Gnumeric to open Office files) but it's got to be a personal decision. to be a personal decision. Hope that wasn't TMI for you :) -/\/ * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
