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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.'"
it's easier to sell businesses and education placces on MACS and WINTEL boxes instead of Linux etc. so if you want unix systems and the fic departments are bitchy about anything not the norm .. then go with osx =]
If you think about it, Macs running MacOS X are really pretty close to ideal scientific platforms for most users in the category. Despite all the (mostly justified) bashing Apple gets for a host of other reasons, a Mac rocks for scientific computing for the following reasons (among others, but these jump out first):
1: MacOS X is Unix. Yeah, so is Linux, but Apple has put the prettiest, easiest to use face on a desktop Unix to date, period. I know and use both KDE and GNOME, and as good as they are, they don't compare in the usability area at all to Aqua.
2: The G4, though it can't keep up on raw clock speed with Intel, is in it's element when we're talking about a lot of the operations needed by people doing scientific number crunching. Write your code to be Altivec-aware (like Apple did when they ported BLAST), and it'll haul butt.
3: Apple provides nice development tools, Cocoa is a blast once people make the adjustment, AppleScript Studio is a really nice way to do GUI programming, and you can still use all the classic development tools. You can build apps for good old standard Unix, MacOS Classic, Carbon, Cocoa, or Java, and they'll all pretty much just work. And all the tools you need are either included or a free download away.
4: The PowerBook G4. It's pricey, and it's "only" 800 MHz, but it's about as nice as you can get for a portable Unix workstation. I haven't seen a comparable Intel laptop with battery life even close to what I get on my TiBook 667.
Granted, Apple's not playing in the 64-bit space (yet), but in the 32-bit world I'd have to say they're the desktop Unix of choice for most users, especially technical/scientific users.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I am a engineer and at my University I wrote a graphical debugger to control some ARM boards we made.
The problem came when we told other universities that we had this product if they wanted them then they can have them for free.
Only then did I realise that engineers have no clue about software.
They all use Windows because its too scary to step into unix.
Even though most of the important CAD tools are only available for Sun they stay clear of them.
Its about time engineers moved back to unix.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Linux just isn't in the same league as OS X. I installed Debian/Woody on my Duron earlier this week, and thus got a glimpse of the latest KDE and GNOME desktops. While not awful by any means, they still don't feel like a solid desktop environment. (Whatever that means.) OS X /does/, and it's beautiful, and it's Unix underneath.
I use Linux with Windowmaker, Mozilla, XEmacs, and an xterm, because those are all I need and it works great. However, if I weren't a geek hacker, and didn't have an unnatural attachment to the IA32 line, I'd use MacOS X.
I've been bashing Apple for years, but it's always been about their operating system. They've not only "fixed" it, but I'd say they now have the best all-round OS out there.
#19845
How many of you here have actually used MacOSX?
Yes, its pretty much as stable as any other Unix. Yes, the OS never crashes.
But it still has problems.
OSX ships in a very non-secure state. Take a look at The Missing Manual: Mac OSX. You'd be surprised how poor the security is (and at how many vulnerabilities there are) on MacOSX out of the box.
That's one problem. The other problem is performance.
Just because somethings a Unix doesn't mean that it necessarily is slim and trim. OSX is not. It is enormously bloated. On the same hardware, it will run alot slower than previous Mac Operating Systems. Why? Because their GUI is unnecesarily fanciful, with useless animations and "glassy effects".
Run Debian on the same Mac you run OSX on and it will run alot faster, taking up less RAM.
Now, that said, if your willing to forgo the bloaty GUI of OSX, you can just run Darwin and install a minimal GUI like pwm; then, you won't have as much bloat.
OSX is a classic example of how companies add lots of useless features just to make a product more screen-shot worthy (i.e., animations, glassy effects, the whole Aqua appearance), despite the fact that those features don't really offer any advantages to the user.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Pretty crap for what I'm doing, requiring several data aquisition cards (using windows for that). Also no OS X native Matlab yet, meaning I have to switch to (yuck) classic. (I just go and use a SPARCstation).
;)
;)
That said, TeXShop is a great app, I'm doing all my writeup on my PowerBook. Not science though
What the mac is good for is not specifically science yet, it just happens that scientists regard computers as tools and aren't as tolerant of crashes, and don't always have the time to play with the OS.
(I do have a dual CPU IBM netfinity for playing with Linux on
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
As cool as the SGI FUEL system looks on paper, and as cool as the case looks in person, it provides poor value.
We've successfully ported our high end graphics/ video application from the SGI platform to Linux running on a high end dual-xeon workstation.
The Linux/Intel performance is more than double that of the fuel system, and our apps push the system to its limits. And, even figuring in the cost of the high end video boards, the Linux/Intel solution is 1/4 of the FUEL price.
It's very easy to justify the porting cost.