(Didn't notice there was more..) On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 12:35:06PM -0500, Linux Rocks! wrote: > : 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.
Abiword may one day be the Linux word processor of choice. It's not today, though. =( > : 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... Some packages in gentoo are just bound to have problems. I don't know why. Ghostscript and Imagemagick were two of the biggies, and obviously if everything you print goes through one or both, that's Very Bad. Both just seem to work in other dists such as Debian and SuSE. *shrug* > 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. A reply to this notes that HP and Epson both support Linux. This is a nice HP printer with an HP driver written by HP. =) My powerbook has one button, but the OS is designed to only need one. X11 typically needs three. When you have four and two won't work, it's frustrating. I typically use an optical mouse with my Powerbook when I'm doing heavy GUI stuff and I have never used the single button mouse which came with my G5. Just because the OS works with one button doesn't mean that Mac users settle for one. The biggest plea of mac users today is for Apple to begin shipping two or three button mice with scroll wheels with computers and, more importantly, integrated on iBooks and Powerbooks. Apple isn't going to budge on this point, but there have been mumblings here and there about swapping the Apple/Synaptics touchpad in notebooks for one made by a third party (also a Synaptics device) which provides at least two buttons. With few exceptions, USB and firewire devices Just Work. (These are the primary expansion methods on a mac..) We are somewhat careful about IDE, SATA, SCSI, and Firewire PCI cards we put into PowerMacs not because drivers don't exist for them (many do have drivers) but because we want something supported by the existing drivers so that we will have no trouble booting off the drives in them. The distressing point is the number of PCI network chipsets which are not supported by Darwin. One notable excuse is that every Mac has Ethernet onboard and the onboard ethernet is supported. There are, at this time not many Gigabit chipsets, and at least one of the major ones is supported. 3rd party Broadcomm 802.11g is supported, and so is anything based on the Proxim/Lucent Orinoco 802.11b chipset. Generic Prism support would be nice since it is by far more common than Orinoco (which is better but sells for a premium, even in 3rd party labelled and OEM channels.) BSD drivers can be ported (some of them have been) and Linux drivers could be, but Apple could never include those drivers because of the GPL. > : 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! The NeXT is still one of the best designed things out there today. I basically bought a brand-spanking new NeXT box - made of aluminum rather than magnesium. =) > : 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... Better is a matter of perspective, as someone who programmed both. Hardware-wise, the 8080A was lovely for the time. The 6502 was much harder to program because it lacked registers, but it made up for them in hardware simplicity. Even I made a couple of things that plugged into //e slots back in the day. Motorola has basically lost its major market with Apple. Apple knows that IBM is making the PPC chips that are actually useful at this point, so Apple is now dealing with IBM directly. Good move, IMO. > : 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. Show me one sub-$1000 IA32 notebook that writes DVDs without hanging a drive off a USB or Firewire port. I have yet to see it. > : 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! I had that arrangement. It was clunky and the drives were fragile. > : 8. Sexy metal keyboard > > I like that too! and the iluminated panel. That light isn't on the 12" model, FWIW. > : 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. I do read them. But I also see for every complaint two "no problems here" messages. Everyone with a problem posts. Most without problems don't. My own Powerbook will be going in for service after the term is up. Since it has the original 12" shell, the metal in places is kinda soft and will tend to bulge outward. Cosmetic, but annoying. Apple is replacing the shell on any powerbook with the problem, but it's not convenient for me to be without the machine for a few days while they do so. I think they did have some hardware bugs in a couple of iBooks that were pretty annoying, including Larry's model. Usually the service complaints are related to the stores such as the Mac Store downtown, which is not actually Apple. Don't get me started on the problems with outsourcing your warranty service to stores. While I'm sure the guys downtown mean well, any problems with my machines will be fixed by me when warranty permits, by the people here at the university (who are also Apple authorized repair people), or by Apple directly. _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
