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Why Developers Are Switching To Macs
snydeq writes "Programmers are finding themselves increasingly drawn to the Mac as a development platform, in large part due to Apple's decision to move to Intel chips and to embrace virtualization of other OSes, which has turned Mac OS X into a flexible tool for development, InfoWorld reports. The explosion of interest in smartphone development is helping the trend, with iPhone development lock-in to the Mac environment the chief motivating factor for Apple as a platform of choice for mobile development. Yet for many, the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development, with developers citing its virtual memory system's poor performance in paging data in and out of memory and likening use of the default-network file system, AFS, to engaging oneself with 'some kind of passive-aggressive torture.' What remains unclear is whether Apple will lend an ear to this new wave of Mac-based development or continue to develop products that lock out uses programmers expect."
OS X is really a good middle ground between Windows and Linux.
Yes, you get the worst of both worlds.
> So don't use it. Macs are for cocksuckers. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty crappily these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
Hmmm that's harsh, don't you think?
Poli7ics openly.
The real answer to this, is no. Just no.
Anyone with half a clue who is a developer makes their stuff on something more cross-platform friendly....bsd or unix.
So yes, umm, developers developers developers! Sheesh.
2. It will run Windows, Linux, BSD, and Mac OS/x so if you are going multi-platform on the PC it is the way to go.
3. It will run the Google Phone development stack and the Iphone/IPod stack.
Since when is vendor lock-in a feature?
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
Did you know that a Mac is a PC? Distinguishing them by that name is the mark of a fanboy. Nice try, claim you use the alternatives while missing important details.
It is a bit harsh. I like to think of Macs as being the computing platform of choice for homosexual men who, incidentally, perform fellatio on other men.
It's in the delivery, dude. It's the difference between a -1 flamebait and a +3 informative.
Does it occur to the author that if Apple allowed virtualization of OS X this wouldn't be a story?
Apple is over priced buggy crap (battery failures in the high teens, same with hard drives for their Macbooks.)and they live for the lock in, tying you to their view and their systems.
If you could run (legit) virtual OS X then the story would be developers using less expensive systems with higher hardware specs running OS X virtual in Linux or Windows.
My PC laptop has the same system specs for 799 dollars that a high end Macbook Pro has for 2700.
You "developers" must be rich, I mean why else would you pay for that? Stupid?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
yet you still got modded -1 troll... Delivery has nothing to do with it.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
It's amazing how many clueless people come out of the woodwork with stories like this. Let me guess: you aren't a "dev", are you? You've never written a line of quality code in your life. You're a "/.er". So you know just what us "devs" think, because wow, you have just so much in common with me.
Think again, asshole.
Thanks for your anecdote which is meaningless. I'll throw in another anecdote. I have 100 Dell computers from 2.8 single core to 2.8Ghz dual core and all with about 1 Gig of RAM and they ALL work just fine on XP thank you very much.
There's really nothing wrong with programming on a current iMac.
Anodized aluminum, so people won't laugh at you.... No more embarrassing colors copied straight off a queer-pride flag.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Because I couldn't do it you must be lying. Glad you're not my tech support guy. Seriously, if I came back at my boss (or client) and said this, I'd be out on my arse, so top marks in customer service.
Don't mind the fact that some app's may require FileMaker (Traffic Office manager is one I can think of, cant wait until they finally replace it with something useful).
The old "it doesn't happen for me so it doesn't happen" excuse is not a good one, you'd do well if you stooped using it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
and none of us seem to have received this shitty memo, or even heard of it.
You must not ever attend technical conferences or you'd realize the truth of it just looking around.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
yep, just as meaningless as the post he was responding to.
I for one find my mac at work to be far more responsive than my windows machine, but I mostly blame that on the crap that is visual C++.
Turn off your NT page file
Fill up the RAM
Malloc more than is free
Core dump (or kill a random task, which will cause a core dump later)
Let me guess on a non-NT box, requesting more RAM than is physically available just magically works by allocating ionized gas from the user? Do you call it the plasma memory area too?
By the way, Linux and OS X do not require page files either. Furthermore you can completely tune your page file to do anything you want. You want more system cache, adjust swappiness down. Want to swap everything, make it 100. You can even make your swap file on a RAM disk if you're really brave. You can of course, totally rewrite the VM system if you want, or replace it with one of the other VM's you can get for Linux because you have the source code.
Really? You might want to fact check a bit of this.
As for configuration and memory management offering you the ability to 'to do anything you want'... How often do you write your own VM? Ok, done with this silly placating. Do you even have a grasp of the VM in Linux and that by replacing the VM it is no longer Linux, right? I could write my own VM for NT as well (and truly could) and run it, but it would no longer be NT or NT VM mechanisms...
(Just because software is closed source does NOT mean people cannot read the binaries and modify the code themselves. Open Source is making people stupid and lazy instead of sharing knowledge. Does anyone from the OSS world even get that 'having source' is barely different than reading the assembly code from the binaries?)
The VM of Linux is configurable, yes, but so is the VM of NT, as well as the cache priorties, etc. And one could even argue there is more control of this on NT, as many of the features you can configure on NT are not even available to Linux. Hell it wasn't even until 2.6 that you got reverse mapping or other basic concepts NT and other OS VMs have been doing for a long time.
Even doing an install without a swap partition was a hack and a trick prior to 2.6, and this makes no sense since HDs don't contiguously allocate partiions, as they did MANY years ago and why a 'partition' was used. BTW Even a Linux swap parition can be fragmented, even though Wikipedia reads that it is only NT's use of a dynamic pagefile that could create a fragmented VM area. - Anyone that wants to fact check this and fix Wikipedia, please feel free, and you can even credit yourself.
We could take this argument to technical levels and talk about -pmap and the three levels of VM in Linux and the medium/media priorty system for VM, but I am afraid if the concept of depleating RAM with a Malloc request seems 'magical' to you, this would be more of a lecture with you getting a free class in kernel architecture and memory management rather than a real debate.