[sac-forum] Re: Mac vs. PC

While I still love the Mac and do most of my work with them I have a desktop PC and two Dell laptops I use for telescope control and data acquisition. Mainly because Meade and most others have not ported their software to the Mac. Also, the PC laptops are pretty cheap.

I'm a diehard in that while my G4 has OSX I still use OS 9.2 for all my work. My web site is hosted on a G3 with OS 8.6 and has been running for years with no problem. One reason I stick with OS9.2 is all my software works great with it. To go with OSX would require a substantial investment.

I had a terrible problem with my last Dell with XP Pro. Once I had all the updated loaded it has worked fine since. Still I feel the Macs are light years ahead of the PC for ease of use and power. There are still many things I can do with a Mac that I can't with a PC or at least nowhere as smoothly. OSX releases al the power of UNIX and still has the ease of the Mac. When I develop softeare either in C++ or databases in FileMaker Pro, I have the ability to compile in Mac OS, OSX and Windows or make runtimes in any of those.

I still find it amazing that some PC users do not know what drag and drop is. That was common on the Mac over 10 years ago.

Jeff

At 19:59 -0700 7/27/06, Stan Gorodenski wrote:
All,
This is off topic, although an operating system for astronomy is relevant especially since this forum is supposed to be open to a wider spectrum of discussions.

Jeff Hopkins has always bragged about having a MAC instead of Windows. I never took the alleged superiority of a MAC over Microsoft very seriously, but now I do. Below is an exerpt from a person where I used to work who is head of tech support and maintains the LAN. This person is very competent.

START OF MESSAGE:
i've switch all my PC stuff to Macs. i've given up on micro-slop, i've absolutely had it. so i've been trying to organize all my remaining MS stuff onto the Mac, but the mail is the one thing im having some trouble with. i thought i set the clients to 'leave the mail on the server' but im not sure exactly what happened. anyway, im sorry for the delay; i got several messages from my friends in Mich too, and now i have to explain to them why i've waited a month to answer.

i am really enjoying the macintosh machine. i got a laptop, and i take it back and forth to my house and my dads in tempe. i hook it into the big LCD monitors i have in both places, and i can work on my photos and movies and it works great. it was time for me to do something; i was getting forced (like everyone) into whatever MS wanted us to use, whatever OS they happen to be pushing that day. i got tired of the blue screens, the memory leaks, the sloppy performance in general. so i got SUSE linux, versin 9 or whatever the latest was, and installed that. it worked pretty good, but for things like the plugins for my Nikon SLR i needed to install some .tar.gz files.. this is pretty easy, i've done it lots of times with all my unix/linux work, but there were issues with it. they didnt work consistently, and i was having to spend a lot of time in the net reading the forums trying to get things to work. in short, it just wasnt ready for 'primetime' yet, at least for me. the next thing was the mac, which is based on unix anyway, so i started investigating that. after about a month or so, i decided to do it. and its been the best decision ive ever made, at least for PC related stuff. most of what i do now is pix and movies, surfing the net, and email. the mac is perfect for all that. my software investment has been less than i thought; about $500 for the movie editing software, the photo editing and managing stuff, and the equivalent of word and excel. there are a lot of nice features with it, and the best thing, of course, is that it 'just works.' ive had no issues whatsoever with it. 

--
Jeff Hopkins
HPO SOFT
Counting Photons
http://www.hposoft.com/Astro/astro.html
Hopkins Phoenix Observatory
7812 West Clayton Drive
Phoenix, Arizona 85033-2439 U.S.A.
www.hposoft.com

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