Slashdot Mirror
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
I assume that they have not really given Linux a try, and should not compare it to OS/X for that reason
I don't think you have a single reason to assume this. In fact, I suspect that research scientists, like other professionals, know their own business better than you or I. In other words, one can assume for the most part that they are familiar with the available tools of the trade and choose according to their needs.
Heck, I could "assume" that you are a Linux advocate simply because you've never given Mac OS X an adequate try. I mean why else would you have made a different choice than I did? I'm sure you'll agree that this conclusion would be unwarranted.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
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
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
displague wrote:
> 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.
Sorry, but your fantasy doesn't jive with the article.
Scott Sneddon said he had been using Mac for years. He was using Mac, Linux, and SGI at the same time for different tasks. Then along came OS X, and he said "good-bye" to his Linux and SGI boxes, and freed up much disk space. He also said that "OS X is a better Unix development environment than Linux or Silicon Graphics Irix". Having done development under all three platforms (though SGI was ten years ago), I must agree. Cocoa is really sweet.
Craig Hunter, from NASA, replaced his SGIs with Macs running OS X.
Gaurav Khanna also replaced his SGIs with Macs running OS X.
Rob Meyer's company used to produce software for the Mac, and now they are back. Rob Meyer himself is a long time Windows user, and thinking of buying himself a Mac.
> 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....
Nope, you are point free. Next time, try actually reading the article before you post a comment.
"Godzilla and Jaguar: Punch! Punch! Punch! Hit! Hit! Hit!
We die if they stop fighting for us."
Jet Jaguar Song, "Godzilla vs. Megalon"
Matlab has been out for OS X for awhile now. Latest version is 6.5, same as all other platforms. Spec page here.
Two quick answers:
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.
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.
Nothing is useless in OS X. 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.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
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.
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
And your attitude couldn't possibly have anything to do with it. Hint: saying "it would be nice if I could turn some of the Aqua effects off to reduce CPU usage" makes you appear reasonable. Proclaiming that Aqua is useless and calling people who disagree with you idiots makes you appear to be a jerk.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.