Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Scientists Switch to Mac OS X

Posted by pudge on from the i-try-to-get-out-and-they-pull-me-back-in dept.

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.'"

2 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. who are they to compare OS/X to linux? by displague · · Score: 0, Troll

    These 'scientists', if they are like those I've encountered in other places, are probably still running twm/3dwm with a few xterms and using Xlib/motif for their development... While some labs are Sparc/Solaris based (and antiquated), these fellows sound like they are SGI/Irix based (and antiquated)...

    Some secretary probably wanted a new Mac. When it arrived the guys wanted to check under the hood. They found that it is 3 million years ahead of their SGI boxes and decided to start switching/porting.

    I seriously doubt that they got into doing this with Linux... My guess is that they installed Redhat 5.0 a few years ago, and then maybe tried 6.2 on an underused partition, eventually scraping it when their uncompressed images needed more space... They probably never really investigated Linux as an alternative. And now that they can go out and buy a stylish OS/X system, they won't have to...

    Do I have a point? No.. Hmmm, a sure sign that I'm just ranting...

    Wait! I do have a point - I assume that they have not really given Linux a try, and should not compare it to OS/X for that reason....

    --
    Marques Johansson
  2. Re:Matlab for OS X out for awhile by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 0, Troll

    That's not what you originally said. Here's the quote:

    "Also no OS X native Matlab yet, meaning I have to switch to (yuck) classic."

    So which is it? Or should you just cut the crap and admit that you weren't actually paying attention?

    Now, you may use really specialized hardware and not be able to do science on your Mac, but that doesn't make it less useful for scientific applications. If you read the article you'd know that these guys aren't just THINKING about doing scientific work on the Mac, they're actually DOING it. They're doing BioTech and Fluid Dynamics and probably a bunch of other stuff. So, I'd say that this assertion of yours:

    "What the mac is good for is not specifically science yet..."

    is false.