[Sussex] SPARCBooks, Powerbooks and bog standard laptops

[The ol' tealeg]

Neil wrote:
-----------
> I have a friend who's into this kind of stuff, I'll pick his brains. I
> know he has a sparcbook running on his network somewhere.

Thanks.  Have a nice girly from Tadpole sending me some info as well.

> The powerbooks and iBooks are become the geek machine of choice. A lot
> of platform independent (perl, etc.) developers. Apple ran a piece 
> recently on Simon Couzens (Perl and unicode guru) switch to the Mac
> and OS X.

Yup, I saw all that stuff, and I know you're correct, but the GUI still
doesn't do it for me... it has a definite "wow" factor but in hard usage
I find it slow and irritating.

> Apple have of course just released X11 Public Beta for OSX, along with
> an SDK. And you have Fink (fink.sourceforge.net) to satisfy all your 
> unix utility needs (it uses some process called apt-get and deselct, 
> I'm sure I've seen those somewhere before :-) (cue Steve))

Yup, I'm running fink and it helps, a_lot_, I have X11 running on the
Mac and, well, it's slower than running OS 9 in "classic".

> I spend a lot of my time in terminals but it's nice to have a solid
> gui that understands all the hardware, plug and plays when you really
> need it (like just plugging in a printer and printing). Having Word
> and being able to output pdfs (to send proposals to clients) is
> excellent for me but may not float everyone's boat.

Oh I agree with this - Apple do a very good job - please don't get me
wrong.  To this day I don't think I could have bought a better machine
for Sarah's needs and I could happily live and work with these machines
in the office space - it's just ultimately, I feel, given the choice, I
wouldn't choose Mac OS X for me.

> And of course Apple offer you everything from the 12" iBook (Nat loves
> her's) to the 17" widescreen Powerbook (the case manufacturers must be
> loving that one, whole new product ranges)

Yup, they all look cool and well built. I know, I know, I _should_ want
one, I _should_ be salivating at the prospect.  Maybe that's the whole
reason I'm not though, I'm a perverse bugger at heart.

> You gotta go with what fits your requirements. Having been a longtime 
> Mac Advocate, I was very surprised at the number of people I knew who 
> had gone out an bought iBooks or Powerbooks once they'd had a chance
> to use OS X. But these ARE mainly people for whom the underlying OS
> isn't a problem as long as they can use the machine to produce code
> for their target platform. If your writing code for i368 Linux, get a
> machine that can run it. If not, why settle for crappy PC hardware?

There are actually very few situations on LINUX where you have to worry
about what hardware you're developing on - if you write decent source
and distribute as source then it really shouldn't matter for most things
out in UserLand.  The bigger question is the shift to 64-bit - that has
some implications, but nothing too unsettling.  In the end it's nice to
have a different platform to test on if nothing else.

-- 
-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk 
tealeg at member.fsf.org
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