I love this kind of argument, given that I've worked in IT for over 3 decades and managed huge desktop and server installations in the City running O/Ss you've never heard of, much less know anything about, as well as Gates's junk. You see, I actually *have* TCO figures for real world installs.
Who mentioned Linux, moron?
Given that you can neither spell, nor operate your delete key, and that you appear to believe that jumping to conclusions is logically valid, perhaps you could explain why I should pay the slightest attention to any of your droolings?
I don't see that as true. What hardware is there that cannot be used with a Mac or for which there is not a suitable alternative?
I have a mix of devices scanners, printers, keyboards, monitors, projectors, internal and external hard drives, the list is endless, all bought for use with a PC, some of them up to fifteen years old, all of them work with the Mac.
As far as printers go, so far I haven't found one that the OS doesn't recognise and install the drivers for automatically.
When I bought a new Sony Alpha camera I plugged it into the Mac, the Mac noticed I had a Sony Alpha and configured itself to accept Sony RAW files in iPhoto. What more do I need?
I just asked what.. you don't appear to have an answer. I get the impression you made it up.
Name one of those OSes, I can think of quite a few and have written code on quite a few.
I hate IT guys. As a system designer I have to take into account how bad you can be. It makes my life very difficult.. it would be much easier if I could have some of you sacked and replaced by people who are willing to learn and have open minds.
SunOS is a lot like Linux you know. I bet half the stuff you run is open source ("linux") too. Have you tried Solaris? I prefer vanilla SVR5 myself as its easy to write STREAMS modules if you need near to real-time response like you do in telephone exchanges.
Being able to type is not a requirement for being correct. You have no need to pay any attention to me at all.. I stated fact as I see it and you responded without any facts to backup your claim. Your argument sounds like the usual "I hate M$" argument that some irrational people have. It has nothing to do with how good an OS is or isn't.
If you really want a technical argument feel free.
Seems deeply strange to me that somebody who is claiming to be a unix programming guru (the implication of the latter statement) doesn't understand the difference between open source and linux.
I understand that Linux is a kernel which is a copy of the interfaces in unix but not the actual code (I have seen the source for both BTW but I no longer have a source tape for either). I also understand that most people don't know what linux is and I don't want to confuse them.
BTW I never claimed to be an expert it was Huge.. the fact that I have been designing bits of hardware, software and systems for longer than he has been in IT doesn't make me an expert, anymore than he is.
BTW STREAMS is easy, you should try it some time. The last system I designed used STREAMS modules to implement part of the application as it was too slow to keep switching to user space when data arrived. I wouldn't say its a good idea as it removes what bit of security Unix has but if you test it carefully and know what you are doing it works. The systems are still running in BT exchanges AFAIK.
What I find hard is C++; java is easy, C is easy, PLM is easy, even assembler for x86 is easy but I really hate C++ for some reason.
I learnt to program with Fortran on a CDC3300 BTW, punching cards using a portapunch was a bit boring and you could only get 40 columns on a card. Things were much better when I got access to TSO instead of using batch for everything.
But there you go the early days were full of problems that the kids these days just don't understand.
There will be plenty of specialist stuff for which there is no equivalent - lab gear, device programmers, in circuit emulators etc.
In most other cases there may well be a suitable alternative, one just needs to take more care when buying. Support for legacy hardware will be patchy with OSX as it is with later windows versions.
Much stuff that sits on SCSI, firewire, USB etc ought to be usable. Sometimes it comes down to economics though. For example I had to abandon a decent scanner (Epson GT8000) when I moved to Win2k/XP only simply because Epson chose not to update the drivers. Silverfast however did do a driver for it, at four times the cost of a replacing the scanner.
Out of curiosity, how is the mac handling RS232 devices? Does it recognise the various RS232 to USB adaptors? (which IME have difficulties working correctly on XP in many cases - I had to buy three to find one that let me use my old Wacom tablet)
Don't know. I was not trying to start a holy war, just commenting that there will be less supported hardware on macs than for XP. There is not usually any need for this to be a major show stopper. Compared to vista, OSX has an advantage at the moment.
There are some good USB/Firewire to RS232/RS422/ etc devices around. I've not needed anything like that myself so I've not paid much attention, however ucsm had a long wibble about them recently and the conclusion seemed to be that it's not a problem, but the more obscure Taiwanese stuff probably won't have a Mac driver available.
Well a 5 year old scanner and A1 plotter both failed utterly to work correctly on MAC OSX.
It runs half the speed of the comparable PC on twice the RAM and I tried just about every draw program that had a free trial only to find that none of them supported laser cutters or worked half as well as Corel draw.
I find it slower to use as you ALWAYS have to move the mouse to the screen top to access a menu.
Its dead slow on printing due to everything going raster to postcript to raster.
Its very pretty and easy on the eye, but frankly, its not a deal of use to me except as a word processing web/email and text editing platform.
The tricky stuff gets done on the PC still.
I was extremely disappointed frankly. Even the unix aspects have been well smothered under GUI goo. Or a gooey GUI.
The fact that MAC users seem oblivious to their problems seems analagous to Drivel and his combis, or the rampant 'we think a Dyson at 250quid is better than a 50 quid panasonic' sort of attitude.
It all right, is a mac. If all you need is MSoffice and web/email.
But its few good features are utterly overwhelmed by its total lack of
3rd party support and the high price attached to it in terms of hardware and peripherals.
There has been an issue with drivers for some USB adaptors when used with OS/X on the Intel platform. It seems to depend on the chip used.
I've been using the Keyspan one pretty much daily for over a year. It has Intel drivers from the vendor and I've had no problems at all with it.
It will also switch elegantly in and out of guest environments such as Parallels and VMWare with the Windows driver coming into play.
I have one or two legacy Windows applications requiring serial connectivity that I run on one or other of these environments and they work as well (or as badly) as they ever did on Windows.
Actually I do, which is why I switched to using one over a year ago. I haven't regretted doing so.
With the Intel platform, that could be argued to an extent
I wouldn't say that the OS/X windowing attracts me on grounds of prettiness. Usability is certainly superior in things like Spotlight, which is a far better search facility than the Windows thing, operates far faster and produces results from which it is easy to drill down further. There are a few simple things such as the one button to clear all desktop windows out of the way in order to check something.
It's *substantially* more stable than any Windows environment that I have used, even with basic applications on that. Starting snd suspending is fast and works properly on OS/X and for weeks on end. I just ran 'uptime' on my MacBook Pro (i.e. time since last reboot) and it's at over 8 weeks.
In terms of speed, and here I am talking about user experience rather than artificial benchmarks, OS/X and applications is far faster than Windows. Previously, I had a 3GHz notebook PC with 2GB memory. The MBP is 2GHz, but dual core and same memory. Even from a cold start I can have booted OS/X, have logged in, have all system services started and into Apple Mail while the PC is still loading up. I haven't needed to do anything in terms of system or application recoveries, registry fixes or reloads of the operating system.
Having less hardware support is an advantage. It means that optimisations can be done, as they have been and also that there is a known platform. There is plenty of commercial, or low cost or free software out there for OS/X.
I have one or two legacy Windows applications, but these run very adequately and inexpensively on VMWare. In itself that is useful, because I can have a preconfigured virtual machine stashed away and when Windows inevitably breaks copy it into place and be going again immediately.
That's true of course. For my usage, which is typical mobile usage in one sense but technically onerous in others, OS/X is a very good environment. I would have chucked the thing away and switched to using Linux on a PC platform by now if not. Certainly I wouldn't return to use of Windows as a main platform.
Lucky you. if I sleep i lose all my network drives.
I worked pretty hard to eliminate all but waht I needed from my 98 setup. It was stable mostly, eventually it would rn out of RAM and need a reboot. every two days or so usually. Its now XP and is a shade better. But apps still crash of course.
I shut mine down to save power. Well its an old G4.
Yup..unless teh NAC goes 'filseystem check' in whih case it takes aroudn
7 minutes to boot, its a up a bit quicker than the PC. It runs slower tho. Similar hardware. I tends to go into 'bugger off I am dong somethimg' spinning disk mode from time to time while it pages something in our out.
I never needed to do that on a PC either. Bu then I didn't install loads of crapware.
That is straiight out of the marketing lessons no 1 "how to persent a probelm as an advantage"
There is plenty of commercial, or low cost or free
Shame none of it is much use isn't it?
And how much did THA lots cost you? my PC owes me nothing and neither does this Mac., They are both obsloete, upraded and rehashed to avoid spending cash on bloody computers.
Depends on what 'main' means.
I do three things with computers. Set em up and program and configure them, for which the Mac is good enough - just..its go a decent enough telnet, and it just about runs a halfway decent text editor.
Bugger around bullshitting on the net, which its also reasonably good at, and writing, which provided I close everything except WORD is reasonable as well.
And do engineering and graphic type design, for which the Mac has proved to absolutely and utterly useless. It wont drive the very expensive plotter. No software exists that allows me to do what I want on it easily or cheaply, and it cant understand my scanner either. Neither can the two simulators I want run on it: They need windows, and without buying a f****ng expensive Intel Mac, that's simply not on.
And printing is very slow. Sure i could spend a fortune on a gigahertz processor equipped postcript printer to ratserside postcript, and a gigahertz processor equipped mac to turn te rasters into postcript to sent to teh expensive printer over a 100batseT network connection, but frankly te PC does the job faster on a paralell port plotter.
When I compare the two platforms its perfectly obvious that they are both deeply flawed. The PC is at least ubiquitous, fast and cheap, and does the job, except when it crashes. Its optimised for silly features. The mac is less able to do the job, but its sort of luxury feel. Its like owning a jaguar versus a kit car. Actually the kit car needs constant attention, and is unreliable, but its faster and uses less petrol. The jaguar is expensive, reasonably reliable, but costs a fortine to run and doesn't corner that well. Nor get you there any faster n traffic: ty just fallters yu whilest you drive it.
Linux? thats a luton bodied transit with a desel engine in it. Nothing to look at, and if you want it specialised, you have to mod it yourself, but its stability personified, and chugs away 24x7 doing very boring but necessary work.
If there is any system that I actually LIKE, its Linux. Shame it isn't up to most of what I need to do either..
You're in a thread arguing about nerdy stuff - I think it's safe to assume that anybody still participating is unlikely to be confused about what Linux actually is.
(and you still haven't really explained that you know the difference between linux and open source)
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