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?
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. 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..) 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. 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. 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. 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..) 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. 8. Sexy metal keyboard 9. Warranty for 3 years (that was extra, but I didn't have to buy it at the same time I bought the notebook...) 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
