Why Mac OS X? 1) it's shiny 2) it's Unix 3) everything's a PDF
Two of my most competent coworkers absolutely love their Macs. They also ask me the most "interesting" tech support questions, ones where I feel like I can't say "the problem is that you are using Windows" but at the same time, I get vaguely annoyed that Mac OS X tends to be more trouble than say Linux to set up MySQL client libraries, or compile Boost, or whatever. I can't get *angry* at them, but as a user of *nix for two decades (i.e., a beginner), I want to say "you know, things don't have to be a pain like Solaris or FreeBSD anymore!". But then I wouldn't be able to dump interesting programming projects onto them, so I just fix whatever it is that's causing the problem. Look on the bright side, at least they're not using Windows. I personally prefer Linux over *BSD, but that may be cause I started with Irix. Oh, and my wife has a MacBook Air, too. Which is 1000x easier to troubleshoot than her old Windows laptop. I do not complain. On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 10:05 PM, Michael Hannon <[email protected]> wrote: > Steve Lianoglou <[email protected]> wrote: > > >On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <[email protected]> wrote: > >[snip] > >> At the end of day, and to me as a non-user of OS X, this just seems to > make > >> working on OS X as tedious as working on Windows where you have to patch > >> your > >> system together in bits and bobs. I guess I am spoiled rotten by 15+ > years > >> of dpkg and apt-get and "things just working". Nicer for development in > my > >> book. > > > >Can't argue w/ the fact that this makes developing on OSX a bit of a > >PITA ... it's just that working w/ the rest of OSX is so nice ;-) > > This may alleviate some of the PITA: > > http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ > > (I haven't used it.) > > I *am* curious to know what is so nice about Mac OS X. This isn't a > troll. I > can see that Macs are useful if you have to deal with, say, Adobe products, > etc. But I've never been able to fathom their appeal for work in math, > statistics, science, etc. (My wife has multiple Macs, and she loves the > things, even for her statistics research, but I don't seem to "get it".) > > -- Mike > _______________________________________________ > Rcpp-devel mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rcpp-devel > -- *A model is a lie that helps you see the truth.* * * Howard Skipper<http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/31/9/1173.full.pdf>
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