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Scientists Switch to Mac OS X
Adam Q Salter writes "A Boston Globe article quotes many scientists and engineers who have switched to Apple workstations or have immediate plans to do so. Craig Hunter, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, said 'OS X, I think, is the best Unix I've seen come along, ever.' Scott Sneddon, a senior scientific fellow at Genzyme, is quoted as saying 'OS X is a better Unix development environment than Linux or Silicon Graphics Irix.'"
Matlab has been out for OS X for awhile now. Latest version is 6.5, same as all other platforms. Spec page here.
Don't really offer any advantages to the user? Man, I'd hate to see what your place looks like cause you obviously have no appreciation of aesthetics. Yeah its bloated and has lots of needless animations and such, but the whole thing takes up only about 200 megs in memory. I'm fairly sure these guys will be putting much more ram than that in their machines. And the bloat only kicks in when you're interacting with the desktop. If you just let your simulation or whatever run, the bloat can get swapped out and everything runs just fine. The whole fucking point of all that bloat is to make using it enjoyable. If you're content looking at a cli and your cubicle wall then good for you. You're hardcore. You're leet. Don't try to rip on the OS cause of its attractive interface cause thats one of the two main goals of the OS and you're obviously not getting it.
if your willing to forgo the bloaty GUI of OSX...then, you won't have as much bloat.
If you would stop being such an ass then you wouldn't be so much of an ass.
One: Mac OS X is the only UNIX that has Microsoft Office available to it, period. If you want to be a hermit and be unable to send your scientific reports to PC users since you have inappropriate software, then Linux is for you.
Firstly, your WRONG. CrossOverOffice provides MS Office for Linux users. Also, Wine allows one to run MS products on Linux. Next time, do a little bit of research before making outlandish claims. Secondly, even if you were right, who cares? OpenOffice and StarOffice can save files as MS Word documents, thus Linux users can share their files with PC users, and vica versa. Again, do your research.
Two: Mac OS X may not be the sleekest girl on the block, but her OS underpinnings have been around as long, if not longer, than Linux. Under those "glassy effects" (which are optimized for speed in the 10.2 update) is a CLI and OS kernel that soars.
Glassy effects optimized for speed? Maybe the updated version is faster than the old one, but its still a LOT of bloat, and one would be better off without it. The excellent, minimalist underpinnings of MacOSX are slowed down by its bloated filled-with-useless-features GUI.
Nothing is useless in OS X.
Yea, whatever. Exactly what purpose do the animations serve? What about the Aqua glassy effects? Or the icon zooming? Transparency? All useless, or of very minimal use. All designed for the sole purpose of having good looking screen-shots.
These scientists just believe that using your OS is more productive than having to play with the damn thing each time someone in the Linux dev group sneezes and makes Yet Another Attempt At a Stable Kernel.
When exactly has an unstable Kernel came out under the stable branch of the kernel? I don't recall it happening.
Ever heard of Debian? Makes updating to the latest stable release of packages rather easy. As for updating the kernel, that can also be done rather nicely in Debian, without even having down-time.
Your "quick answers" still do not deal with the fact that MacOSX is bloat-ware. The new finder in it is crap, for example.
One would be better off running a WM in Darwin if one uses Mac hardware, or installing Debian.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I have to disagree with this. People use OS X (or any Apple OS) because of the GUI. If you want a generic UNIX you can run Linux or *BSD and any of the awful WMs in X11. And you can do this on Apple hardware too. But do you notice none of the scientist quoted in the article are doing that?
People use Macs because of the OS, especially the GUI.
2. MacOSX is not synonymous with Mac hardware. They are separate entities.
One again, wrong. Darwin is NOT OS X. You might as well run FreeBSD, unless you really want the Mach kernel. But I remember how much Linux users hated MkLinux because of the Mach kernel being slower.
A quote from the article:
If Apple hardware is so "slow" and "overpriced" as everyone here seems to think, then why would they do that?
Bottom line is, you don't get it. Some people like OS X, AND its GUI. You don't have to.
Also, I'm running OS X 10.1.5 on a 466 MHz G4 with a gig of RAM. It's not all that bloated and not slow at all. Sure, OS 9.2 runs a bit faster. But it's not the GUI. OS 9 is much older code, and has been optimized more over the years.
Any who has used Macs for a while knows that each OS release since 8.0 got faster than the last, even thought they added more features and the OS used more RAM. "Bloat" does not always equal slow.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol