I have an XP-based machine with an AMD Duron 1000MHz processor and decked out with all sorts of silencing features, from the huge passive Zalman ZM80A-HP heatpipe VGA card cooler on my Radeon 9500 Pro to the super-slow Panaflo L1A fans running at 5 volts on my dual 80GB Seagate Barracuda IV hard drives to the quiet 80mm CPU hatsink (retrofitted with quiet NMB fan), to the Fortron-Source "Noise Killer" power supply with 120mm fan.
Uptime: 14 days on several occasions, with daily heavy use.
Automatically defragments the C: hard drive on the first Sunday of the month at 2:00am. Automatically defragments the D: hard drive on the first Monday of every month at 2:00am. Automatically updates virus scanner on Tuesday every week at 2:00am. Automatically scans the entire computer every Wednesday at 2:00am. This thing pretty much takes care of itself.
I'd love to have a mac, though. The G5s just look sweet, and they're practically noiseless. A bit out of my price range, though. I am upgrading to an AMD Athlon XP 2800 (with bigger heatsink but the same silent fan) and a Gig of RAM and a new motherboard with automatic CPU fan speed control, and all the old junk is going into a Linux box. We'll see how that goes.
Uptime: 14 days on several occasions, with daily heavy use.
Automatically defragments the C: hard drive on the first Sunday of the month at 2:00am. Automatically defragments the D: hard drive on the first Monday of every month at 2:00am. Automatically updates virus scanner on Tuesday every week at 2:00am. Automatically scans the entire computer every Wednesday at 2:00am. This thing pretty much takes care of itself.
I'd love to have a mac, though. The G5s just look sweet, and they're practically noiseless. A bit out of my price range, though. I am upgrading to an AMD Athlon XP 2800 (with bigger heatsink but the same silent fan) and a Gig of RAM and a new motherboard with automatic CPU fan speed control, and all the old junk is going into a Linux box. We'll see how that goes.
My computer is so automated, the only thing I ever have to do myself is run Ad-Aware from time to time, and istall Windows Update updates. It even downloads the updates for me, and when I get them, they are ready to be installed. No waiting.
Addendum:
83 adware/spyware objects. Updated Ad-Aware. 25 more were found. Man, that adware is insidious, just as bad as viruses if not worse!
Addendum:
83 adware/spyware objects. Updated Ad-Aware. 25 more were found. Man, that adware is insidious, just as bad as viruses if not worse!
For those of you looking for PCB software on the Mac, see here:
Cadsoft Eagle Beta FTP Site
eagle-4.12r03-beta-m11-eng.tgz is the file I think I used to test it out. Requires you to be running X11. Works pretty solidly. I used to use Eagle on my Mac by running remote X from a spare Linux box, so I wasn't missing much all along.
To add my useless opinion to the mix, I probably get about 10x the work done on my Mac than I ever did on my PC. I can't put my finger on exactly why, but things are just "On My Side" more than they're "In My Way" on the Mac.
For those of you that think you can't get real work done on a Mac, or perhaps no "real developers" work on Macs, I've written an entire realtime PC OS on my Mac using Bochs (Virtual PC has bugs galore!), helped port a few PC games to the Mac (in a past job), and completed many personal programming projects I've been meaning to get around to. (Speaking of which, I'm finally starting work on a native Cocoa-based speaker design tool -- PM me if you're interested in more details).
I'm also biased because my undergrad environment at the University of Waterloo was entirely UNIX-based, and I am most comfortable with gcc/make as my development system.
Sure no big businesses out there use Macs, but I think my needs are slightly different from the typical Fortune 100 company out there...
Just my 0.02 canadian pesos...
Cadsoft Eagle Beta FTP Site
eagle-4.12r03-beta-m11-eng.tgz is the file I think I used to test it out. Requires you to be running X11. Works pretty solidly. I used to use Eagle on my Mac by running remote X from a spare Linux box, so I wasn't missing much all along.
To add my useless opinion to the mix, I probably get about 10x the work done on my Mac than I ever did on my PC. I can't put my finger on exactly why, but things are just "On My Side" more than they're "In My Way" on the Mac.
For those of you that think you can't get real work done on a Mac, or perhaps no "real developers" work on Macs, I've written an entire realtime PC OS on my Mac using Bochs (Virtual PC has bugs galore!), helped port a few PC games to the Mac (in a past job), and completed many personal programming projects I've been meaning to get around to. (Speaking of which, I'm finally starting work on a native Cocoa-based speaker design tool -- PM me if you're interested in more details).
I'm also biased because my undergrad environment at the University of Waterloo was entirely UNIX-based, and I am most comfortable with gcc/make as my development system.
Sure no big businesses out there use Macs, but I think my needs are slightly different from the typical Fortune 100 company out there...
Just my 0.02 canadian pesos...
Cal Weldon said:
You forgot the second part of the sentence, which specified fortune 100 companies.
I would not be shocked to learn that Apple is the only company on the Fortune 500 list that uses more than 30% macs. I don't count "macs in the documentation group" or "macs for the advertising guys" as full-scale mac deployment. They're out there, but not standard issue by any IT department by the majority of companies.
I also know that there are a few big players starting to adopt Xserves, but I hear that their adoption is more in the trial stages rather than fully deployed right now. It's hard to seperate truth from Apple's marketing speak sometimes.
I'm fine with no huge adoption of Apple technology in larger companies, though. Apple just has to crack that market (which they're trying hard to do) and they'll do just fine. Otherwise, I'm happy with them continuing to target "the rest of us" and selling us "MS Office for the rest of your life". If Apple treated us like Microsoft treated the end-users at households across the country (since big business takes a lot of cash and effort to support), we'd hate them too.
If we had Apple servers and Apple workstations in all sorts of companies around the world, I'm sure people would complain just as much about them as they complain about Windows machines. We just have to accept that software, in general, sucks for the most part. See we.hates-software.com for some good examples of people griping about just about everything Apple, Linux, IBM, and Microsoft. Nobody's free from it on any platform, coming from any company, or whatever.
People should just buy what's best for them before they buy what everyone else has. If more people thought that way, they'd probably end up with more Apple machines anyway.
Chris
.... water cooled Mac with equal speed as 12 GHz PC!!!!!http://www.apple.com/powermac/
Want to have.....
You're comparing a water-cooled dual processor MAC running one hand-picked application to a single processor stock P4 (which has the lowest performanc per clock of all "PC" processors)??!?
How about comparing that water-cooled hotrod to a dual processor AMD FX/Opteron on a variety of benchmarks and software packages?
It's these hyped-up Apple claims that PC users find the most humorous.
How about comparing that water-cooled hotrod to a dual processor AMD FX/Opteron on a variety of benchmarks and software packages?
It's these hyped-up Apple claims that PC users find the most humorous.
After many years as a dedicated Linux user, I just bought a 1.33Ghz 15" powerbook. It's really wonderful to use, but I'm shocked at how slow it is compared to comparably priced PC hardware. For a laptop, that doesn't matter much. It's plenty fast for running latex and reading email , and I've got a cluster of big PCs in my lab for doing large-scale numerical modeling. But I have to admit, after all the hype, I'm a bit let down at the performance, and now I have serious doubts about some of their claims for their bigger machines.
Pffffff...
Is that stable?
In my hardware days, 14 years ago, I installed a Unix system in a hotel.
Compaq Systempro server and "stupid" terminals (we call them stupid because everything runs on the server, the terminal is just a screen, RS232 connection).
It worked continuously without one single problem for 4 years.
In the meantime, they had problems with the internal tape drive.
I opened the server, cleaned the heads of the tape drive, closed the lid, made a backup and fine.
Without powering that thing off!
I must say that this thing had more than 20 terminals/users always connected and working.
Windows?
5th element said:
Is that stable?
In my hardware days, 14 years ago, I installed a Unix system in a hotel.
Compaq Systempro server and "stupid" terminals (we call them stupid because everything runs on the server, the terminal is just a screen, RS232 connection).
It worked continuously without one single problem for 4 years.
In the meantime, they had problems with the internal tape drive.
I opened the server, cleaned the heads of the tape drive, closed the lid, made a backup and fine.
Without powering that thing off!
I must say that this thing had more than 20 terminals/users always connected and working.
Windows?
A computer featuring the AMD Athlon FX-53 (the Alienware Aurora, which is basically just like the sort of computer you'd likely build yourself from available parts) is also in the test. It was beat by a Dual 3.2GHz Xeon workstation, and was slower at performing the test (which, though not thoroughly indicative of a processor's true performance on more mundane tasks, represents the type of application that Mac users are more likely to run and thus, the test results are representative of the performance Mac users are more likely to care about) than the Baseline machine, a Dell XPS (basically their Precision workstation souped up for gaming) with a 3.4GHz Pentium 4.
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