Apple Anyone? (Split from laptop development thread)

[piersk]

I know I'm going to get hit hard for this, but I prefer a Mac.

I disagree. After all, having a Mac (as long as you're running at least OS X) is the nearest you can get to running Unix without actually running it.

I'd love to have a Mac as my personal laptop, but unfortunately I sometimes have to work from home and I can't connect to the work VPN with a Mac. Oh, and I do ASP with SQL server so I have to connect to the SQL servers to do anything. With a Mac (AFAIK) thats not possible.

[bpat1434]

I do have to hand it to Mac's virtualization technology like VMWare Fusion (http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/) which (not from personal experience) seems to hold up MS operating systems really well.

I'm not a linux guru, and probably never will be, so thus a Mac is kind of that intermediate step between Windows and Unix.... damn it, now I want one even more!!

[piersk]

Thats actually not a bad idea... Paralells might work even better, since you can run the windows programs and not actually look like you're running windows (can't remember what it's called)

[stolzyboy]

i love my powerbooks... just wish i could afford a new desktop and maybe a new macbook, now that'd be a good $10,000 investment, at LEAST!

[bpat1434]

I split this off because I really didn't want to detract from the original poster's question. Anyway, I'd love to get me one of the new iMacs and a PowerBook. That's at least a 5k investment ;)

Eventually I want a wall in my office to be nothing but a cluster of PowerMacs :) How freaking awesome would that be?

[piersk]

I love the idea of using mac minis as web servers. There's a company here in the UK, Mythic Beasts that offers Mac Minis as a dedicated host (http://www.mythic-beasts.com/macmini.html)

How awesome is that?

(I'd like to do the same with mini-itx pcs. Do you think there's a market for it?)

[bpat1434]

That's hot!!! If it wasn't so damn expensive, I'd jump at it.

What are these itx pcs? I'm not familiar with them.

[piersk]

http://www.mini-itx.com/

made my via

Very small parts.

Often used to build mythtv DVR kinda things

[MarkR]

The Mac minis make adequate, but very low spec servers. From what I understand, their disc IO sucks (because they use some old laptop drives or something). Moreover, I've used a mac mini as a server hosted by Mythic Beasts- it's not that fast.

Moreover, there are some hardware features which make them rather unsuitable as servers. Some models won't remember their power state correctly, hence remaining off if power is lost and restored.

I'm talking here about running Linux on them rather than MacOS.

Mark

[Shrike]

I disagree. After all, having a Mac (as long as you're running at least OS X) is the nearest you can get to running Unix without actually running it.

http://www.cygwin.com/ :)

[piersk]

Cygwin != Unix. Cygwin = Unix emulator


Cygwin != Unix emulator. Cygwin = Linux API emulator

[Shrike]

Ok maybe it's not quite as close as Osx. But I thought it was worth a mention :)