[nycbug-talk] Survey for upcoming 'Hacking iBook'

[Bob Ippolito]

On Apr 20, 2004, at 9:34 PM, Sunny Dubey wrote:

> On Tue Apr 20 12:45:01 EDT 2004 Isaac Levy wrote
>
>> There's gotta be a good reason more folks are running Apple
>> kits...
>>
>> http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/04/04/07/2013255.shtml?
>> tid=107&tid=126&tid=156&tid=187
>
> I've noticed that many of you *bsd guys are totally gung-ho on apple 
> ....
> Yet I'm not going to deny that there are many of us who are taking a 
> much
> more pragmatic "wait-and-see" attitude ...

I believe that wait-until-I-can-afford-it is the real excuse for most 
people.  If you have philosophical problems with OS X you could run a 
*BSD or Linux on the hardware and it will work just fine.  Anyway, I 
think that most hardcore *nix-ers are really only buying the laptops, 
because Apple has the best 
price/performance/works-on-free-operating-systems record.  I personally 
own some G4's and G5s, but I'll buy commodity stuff for servers and run 
something else if it's just going to be sitting in a closet and I don't 
want to spend a lot of money.

> Now that my colors have been exposed, I think it is fair that everyone 
> reads
> the following comment from that specific Slashdot article itself.
>
> http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=103252&cid=8797090

I've never seen a /. comment used as "proof" for anything before.. but 
I was a registered ADC Premiere subscriber for the hardware discounts 
(it's about 20% off for up to 10 machines including any accessories, so 
it ends up being quite cost effective if you're buying a bunch of 
apples) last year.  However, I also do develop software, and a good bit 
of that is even extremely specific to OS X, so I am also legitimately 
an ADC member (though I scaled back to select, because we didn't need 
to buy lots of computers this year) :)

> PS:  I've heard that gcc's ppc64 code-gen is crap.  And that people 
> perfer
> using IBM's xl* compiler stuff.  Is this true ? thanks

Yeah, if you need obscenely fast code, you shouldn't use GCC.  Ever, on 
any platform, no exceptions.  Hell, if you need obscenely fast code, 
you're probably writing (parts of) it in FORTRAN anyway, and god knows 
GCC doesn't have a very good FORTRAN compiler.

-bob