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

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Sunny, All,

So it looks like my survey for questions for my shared lecture 
triggered quite a sharp spike in this thread, and an interesting and 
age-old discussion about apples.

I'll respond below, but I'm gonna' ask that if everyone wants to 
continue this discussion, please start a new thread, or go offlist if 
it gets firey, as this direction has sharply cut the amount of great 
questions we were getting before in prep for the upcoming discussion 
(btw thx for everyone who posted questions!!! Post More!!!).



Sorry for the length of what follows, but it's going to be my only 
response to this thread.


--
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 ...

Let me state my personal attitude- Apple, simply represents a 
particular choice.
This choice does not mean that I'm arguing that Apple/Darwin is the 
best, (or that there even IS a best), but simply put- my choice, and 
I've been extremely happy with my Apple choices for many years.

Sunny, what you stated as a "wait-and-see" attitude, that's fine- but 
I'm not interested in this vs. that in general- I'm very happy doing my 
thing, on an apple, and pleased with the diversity of all of the 
respective worlds we decide to participate in as developers and *NIX 
users.  We all have a lot to learn from each other, and creativity is 
the only thing I really value in this whole lot- and I know we all have 
a lot of that...


A brief and final response from me re. Apple's market:
--
So far that I've seen, people who love apple stuff, aren't usually too 
gung-ho on anything in particular, but just have high expectations for 
things they buy (hardwarre), and require a consistent, robust, and 
mature platform for doing stuff (OS).

Many of the developers I've seen at Open Source/Developers/Security 
conferences who use apple machiens, actually work on other things, and 
simply want a solid rig, so they can go do other things, and have 
chosen Apples.  I posted the /. url above because it accurately echoes 
what I've seen at various conferences, nearly or over 50/50 Apple rigs- 
so there is something noteworthy going on.

With regard to comments about cost/hardware elsewhere this thread, 
look- it just works out that Apple machines are highly economical for 
me.  A powerbook lasts me about 3 years before I start feeling slow 
enough to loose productivity, and during that time, I get to use a VERY 
well engineered kit, (important to me based on how much my hands touch 
a computer).  In that time I don't upgrade hardware much, mabye will 
bump the ram, but I just use it- and get the luxury of focusing on what 
I'm working on- (not my kit).
The whole time I get to focus on what's important to me as a developer, 
which personally, isn't my kit.

>
> 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'm not going to get deep into a discussion about market share, except 
to state that I, and most Apple hardcores, have never cared too much 
about being the minority.
If we really want to get into what has market share, we must separate 
the desktop from the server, and totally put the 
scientific/heavy-computation communities in their own group, and really 
look at what's running in those markets:

If it's the personal desktop or enterprise server we're talking about, 
we're talking about MS, and I don't mean to speak for everyone else, 
but this it's likely this list doesn't care too much to discuss MS.


> Have a good one
>
> Sunny Dubey
>
> 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

I don't really know- I don't write 64 bit specific code, but I must 
say, I'm the wrong person to ask directly about nuts and bolts of that.

A lot of developers have trouble grasping the architectural differences 
between PPC and X86 architectures, as they are VERY different beasts, 
and much of the world is rockin' X86- so I'm not surprised if there's 
some madness with compilers- but it's not really my business, so that's 
all I can say.

To answer your specific question, I'd try the opendarwin IRC channel on 
freenode, one of the OpenDarwin mailing lists (there are several);
http://opendarwin.org/mailman/listinfo/hackers

But based on my personal experiences compiling anything on osx/Darwin, 
I'm quite pleased with the ease of use in apple's GCC distro, and have 
been impressed by the tight integration with things like alti-vec 
optimization etc... so I'll personally keep using it for just about 
everything on my Apples.


On Apr 20, 2004, at 10:21 PM, Sunny Dubey wrote:
> I'm not here to start another mindless flame-thread.  Just here to 
> present a
> different mentality.  This is my last post for this thread.  I just 
> don't
> care, finito.

I respect your choice to use and develop for Linux, and I personally 
choose to develop for and use BSD's, and quite often on Apple stuff, so 
I demand that you respect that on this mailing list.  This list to 
discuss BSD stuff, and even all this Apple discussion is likely a bit 
beyond the scope of what's of interest to the NYCBUG members, let alone 
a discussion about Apple vs. Linux, so let's just end this thread 
alltogether- and pick it up over a beer next time I see you.

Best,
.ike