at some point this weekend everyone in my apartment watched the steve jobs keynote video at some apple developer's conference. it's made bryan and i apple converts, i think.
it's boring to write about the technical details, but he presents tons of new features to Mac OS X that pretty much provide the last incentives to unix people who've been holding out: a new finder, native X11R6 support, kerberos, AFS, NFS home directories, built-in samba, home directory encryption, beautiful "fast user switching," cool window management, etc.
then they parade out a bunch of executives from Adobe, Logic, IBM, Mathematica and other companies to talk about how fast the new G5 is. and it's really fast -- a PowerPC chip built in the same factory as the new supercomputer chips at work, except faster. and a cool demo showing a $3000 PowerMac beating a $4300 Dell machine on crazy studio video and music production hardware.
plus, since moving in i'm trying to make a place in my room for my US-428 controller & laptop, and make more songaday songs. but a G5 would just be so nice and fast, having all that floating-point performance. and code would compile crazy fast. and burn DVD's with those crazy DVD authoring programs.
so, i gotta follow mike and julian and get a mac. probably around when the new version of OS X with native X11 comes out, then i'll get a mac.
i suppose, since part of my job is hacking linux kernel code, this makes me somewhat of a linux sellout. but a BSD flavor must not be so bad, right? after all, whenever you buy an intel box, you're forced to pay tribute to microsoft. anyhow, i'll still use linux at work and on my thinkpad, even dual-boot and help with the ppc linux effort, since that's what i edit at work all day.
rumor was that they were thinking of making fast PowerPC (not intel) thinkpads that can run linux only. apparently, back in the early 90's, they made PowerPC thinkpads that could only run OS/2. after windows took over, they had to use intel only, but if ppc linux works well enough, who knows? a dual 2GHz PPC linux thinkpad wouldn't be so bad, either.
wow. this is probably the geekiest entry in my blog to date. i apologize.
Posted by cce at September 8, 2003 01:44 AM | TrackBack'bout time...
the 23" cinema display is also highly recommended ;)
Posted by: Mike at September 8, 2003 01:02 PMI just want that new OS so I can find all my Windows. Hot damn!
Posted by: MANNING at September 8, 2003 05:21 PMApple's X11 is available for download now, and has been for a while (as a beta). Panther just includes the 1.0 version, based on XFree86 4.3.
Yes, Mac OS X rules.
Once you get your mac, be sure to try out Mac OS X: A guide for Former Linux Users. I'll be updating it for Panther when the time comes. :)
Posted by: julian at September 8, 2003 06:32 PMthe thinkpad 820 (or "power thinkpad," or whatever they called that series) was PPC-based and ran AIX. you should get one of those, clearly.
and then also get one of those sparcbooks and grow a beard and mill around at computer conferences and wear a jester hat and talk D&D.
and a factoid: you can "rm -f /dev/r*" on an AIX system and (as of april 1993) everything still works perfectly!
Posted by: ben at September 9, 2003 12:04 AM