[BUGS] hardware changing time .. moving forward

[Andrew Reilly]

Hi Jonathan,

On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:25:00 +1100
jonathan michaels <jlm at caamora.com.au> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 07:33:50PM +0000, Andrew wrote:
> > 
> > On 26 Jan 2008, at 03:21, jonathan michaels wrote:
> > 
> > > past getting a toshiba but lately i have been thinking about
> > > getting an apple notebook, esp if there is one available with a
> > > 17 inch screen with 1990x1600 ish resolution. not teh intel
> > > garbage redressed to look like an apple but a real apple
> > > buitleded box .. any thoughts would be appreciated, please.
> > 
> > All current macs have intel CPUs in them and seem to work fine. The  
> > only 17" laptop though is the MacBook Pro - http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ 
> 
> o'well i suppose at some point apple would have to go backwards
> in terms of cpu choice .. i'm a cpu bigot and prefer the
> mc68xxx seris as being a far far better architecure than
> anything intel can dream up or 'borrow' so to speak.

Naah, the 68k (post '020, anyway) had some fundamental errors
(just like the VAX) (admittedly, they seemed like good ideas at
the time) that made progressing to out-of-order super-scalar
issue close to impossible.  For all it's warts, the ia32 didn't
have those same problems, and so can go faster.  The extensions
that AMD did to take it to 64 bits are all entirely sane, and
the result doesn't suck much at all, IMO.  ISA matters almost
not at all, these days.  Code in C, Java or (better) some
variety of lisp, scheme or ML and be happy.

> > Personally, I have a MacBook, run OSX and am quite happy (well with my  
> > choice of laptop at any rate ;-).
> 
> i've been speaking to some mac owners (ok apple bigots) when i
> filter teh BIAS it makes for a really compelling case (for my
> needs). i really don't understand why this kind of bitternes,
> this kind of pointless emnity exists between apple/intel
> bsd/linux/microsoft. it makes getting information from teh
> relevant camps (really) difficult at times, really confusing.

Hey: you were the one coming out with the anti-intel rhetoric
just now...

My two cents (or so):
I really love my 12" G4 PowerBook, but it's getting a bit slow
by today's standards.  Wish Apple had made one follow-on with
the PWRficient dual-core PPC-64 chip before switching to
Intel...

I particularly love MacOS-X on it: it's easily the best Unix
workstation environment that I've used, and I've been using them
exclusively since Sun in '86 or so.

I also really love my AMD64-X2 FreeBSD-7-STABLE workstation,
although it has been sufficiently painful to set up as a desktop
that I hesitate to recommend it to anyone else just yet.  GNOME
spazzed out on me recently, until I figured that there were a
bunch of new daemons that I had to turn on in /etc/rc.conf.
Also *had* to set LANG to en_AU.UTF-8 or else the epiphany web
browser would just crash.  Also can't get the nv driver to work,
and the vesa driver will only push my display to its native
1600x1200 when the wind is blowing the right way.  For all that,
it's my mental home, and it seems as though things are coming
together for it really beautifully (if a bit slowly).  I don't
know that I'd trust FreeBSD to run a laptop properly for me yet,
though: too much weird hardware in them.

It's good, I think, to have waited until the second round of
Intel-based Mac laptops.  A colleague of mine got one of the
first, and it had motherboard overheating problems.  I think
that they're much better in that regard, now.

Good luck with the hardware hunting.  Most of it seems pretty
good at the moment.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew