swisswuff's Profile

From my point of view, the role of "software" and "virtualisation" is grossly overrated here. In reality, VPC's performance always more than sucked. It never delivered anything CLOSE to the real thing. I couldn't even use it to enter some simple guitar tabs. So, from my viewpoint, I believe that affordable fast PC hardware became the true enemy of VPC. For maybe less than about twice the amount of money that VPC cost, you could buy a reasonably fast, un-sluggish, real PC that allowed you to do not only Windows, but Linux as well; some time later, you'd get them with multimedia and TV all built in, delivering a stable performance as well. Counting all the hours that VPC fiddling cost, and the unacceptable performance, I'd guess that most serious computer users just got themselves PCs instead of eternal-wait-software that wouldn't perform well. I bought an Acer Veriton 3500 back when I started to require Windows and Linux software after realising that VPC would never get anywhere; in the meantime, I upgraded that machine to a more recent Acer pizzabox model, and there's no looking back.

Yes... I've liked Mac OS X and Mac software since they first came out with MacPaint - but I'm far from being fixed on this one platform, because the hardware is painful and expensive. Linux is free, PCs are cheap, AMD Opterons are ROARING, and you get a choice between Fujitsu Siemens, Sun, HP, and shops like Monarch Computer who will sell you very good, very powerful hardware for about half the price you pay for a mediocre G5. When you buy an Apple, you immediately replace the keyboard with a real one (I use IBM type M stuff with PS2>USB adapters), you immediately replace the mouse with a real one (I use Razer models) to begin with. Then I'd pay up to 400 bucks for an official Mac OS X release to run it on one of those "PC" computers - and Apple COULD have provided IBM with an OS X Server version for the high end PPC based server line of IBM, they COULD have adopted some AIX features for a revamped OS X to really bost it, and then added AMD and some higher end PPC processors such as the Power 5 to their collection of CPUs and offered a Universal Binary for OS X that would kick some major butt all over the industry. So, Linux is pretty cool, and some of the KDE or Gnome features are already more intuitive and nicer than things on OS X. I recently caught myself cleaning up files under Konqueror/X11 on my Mac rather than using the Finder. I have recently successfully set up my WACOM INTUOS 3 on an AMD workstation under Linux; while you get to edit some text files there, you also have a choice of powerful tablet options not available on a Mac. Currently, I'm seeing our Macs slowly becoming the nice-to-have still sleek looking GUI front ends that increasingly only get to do some kiddy crap such as play iTunes, read mails, run backups and look at some text or PDF files. All real stuff is slowly migrating to faster AND cheaper Windows / Linux PCs, and each new Linux version, each new Linux hardware driver, each new desktop system - KDE, GNOME - is better than the previous one already at a level that surpasses Windows or OS X. Yes, iPhoto is so so, but Menalto Gallery or Coppermine Gallery running on your php/web-server are far more useful in the long run - and while you can run that on OS X, you can run that also on Linux, with just about the same effort.

I like to run the command-line software "mplayer" on my Mac, or on my Linux, to play back music. It feels much more down to earth, and it works flawlessly. What you can do with Linux and with Mac OS X, is run software that requires a dual AMD Opteron 280 processor and 32 GB of RAM, on full 64-bit support. You can easily have your setup using KDE 3.5.1 which includes a "Finder" (Konqueror) that, for example, features fast and precise previews and thumbnails of raw postscript files. Depending on your Linux, you WILL get a roadmap that helps you channel expectations and plan ahead. And while you could bend over backwards to port some of that to a Mac, it's not there. Apple is somewhere entirely different. Their line of G5s were basically set up with flawed logic boards, and some software still isn't 64-bit. There's currently not the faintest idea of a high end Intel Powermac - even though they could simply sell some Xeon Powermacs right there.

You always have to make a choice. Black, white, RAM, harddisk, whatever. If I had mine, I'd be able to run OS X on the Fujitsu Siemens Celsius H240 notebook which not only offers the Core Duo, but a 1900 x 1200 resolution, two (!) harddisks and two (!) batteries as well as up to 4 GB (!) RAM. I bet you can wait forever until Apple builds a notebook like that, and I bet that when they ever plan to release it, it'll cost twice as much as any other manufacturers' similar hardware setup. Why would anyone buy a computer, today, with less than at least 1 GB RAM? Even the iMac G3 SE offered a much better performance when equipped with maximum RAM (which was 1 GB I think). That RAM rules in terms of performance is not new to any computer.