[Sussex] SPARCBooks, Powerbooks and bog standard laptops

[Steve Dobson]

Geoff

I've been following this SPARCbook thread.

On 16 January 2003 at 00:46 The ol' tealeg wrote:
> 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....
<snip> 
> 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.

I would be wary of the SPARCbook.  I had the pleasure of playing with one
just after they first come out, back before the ULTRAsparc hit the streets.
The company I was working for paid a fortune for it, five figure sum, and 
compared with the Sparc 20 (it had the same CPU & Graphics card - which is
why we needed that model) it was slow.  If I remember right they had resuced
the CPU speed to provide a bit more power.  Battrey life sucked to (come to
think of it is was about the same as my Vaio - then then I didn't buy that
for it's battery life either).

Okay, I know that on a single CPU system Linux flys compared with Linux,
but that same would be true on the iBook too wouldn't it?  I can see you
spending a lot of money and not getting that much for it.

> > 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".

So dump the shipped OS and install Linux.  I'll run fast I'm sure.
 
> > 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.

But you won't get that with Solaris.  Any way they ship with Gnome now
or will soon - it can be downloaded for Solaris 8.

> > 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.

I would have though that Apple ship more of their laptops that Tadpole do.
If you like the looks and the hardward (and you can afford it) then that's
the laptop for you.  Let's face it in laptop land there is no way of getting
one without paying for an OS these days.

> > 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.

If you're going into that then you have even more problems.  I can remember
Sun's presentation to me years ago when they first announced 64-bit that
on (HP I think) use a different 64 bit number format.  This has an effect
when bit slicing, and maksing of hardware registers.  This should only 
really be and issue for kernel hackers.  App-land hackers should write in
a way that don't cause problems - portablity is normally more important 
for applications than abolulte raw speed - of course there are always
exceptions.

Steve