Eric P. Peterson wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

[snip]
well do NOT run a intel emulator on a powerPC chip. DOS yes, windows..it
works..but the cursor moves about as fast as a snail on morphine ;-)

On *86 type platforms, its obviously better.

Doesn't look good...

The MS Orifice stuff runs OK on a mac, as long as thats ALL the mac is
doing.

Probably a good thing, then, that I have a data management configuration
under OS 9.2.2. I switch to this set using Conflict Catcher whenever I
want to use M$ Word or Excel. These apps don't appear to function as
well in Classic Mode under OS X. Indeed, launching Word in this way
causes Classic to collapse altogether, without so much as an error
message!

The mac is pleasant enough at WP, multimedia, e-mail and browsing. It is
obviously well supported in graphical art and typography, if $1000 a
shot for software doesn't upset you. But there is virtually nothing on
the engineering/Cad-cam side..CNC cutters do NOT talk postscript or PDF ;-)

Works for me, as I don't do anything in the engineering/scientific
fields with my Macs, but I do those things you credit the platform as
doing well.

It also has a nasty habit of splattering shared drives with ._whatever
files, to store its 'metatada' on: irritating if you are generating non
macintosh files.

Now, that I don't like. I find files of that nature--some invisible,
some not--while booted into OS 9.2.2. The files don't appear to cause
any problems, but it always bothers me to discover files unexpectedly.

Best GUI, slowest platform, worst 3rd party support, most expensive
overall.

Slowest? Really? How do we account for that? And is there any hope of
improvement there?

Throw money at it. More RAM more CPU power. I reckon you need about +50%
RAM and 2x CPU speed to get the same subjective speed versus XP..thats
mainly on effing around with windows and the visuals though. Its fast
enough doing normal stuff. Until you run MS Word anyway..then you do get
weirdness, or I do. It multitasks different from windows - more unix
like - the user focussed window isn't at such a high priority which
means the world doesn't stop when you type.

I just fired up activity monitor (a pretty face on 'top')

MS Word with a file loaded takes up 30MB ram, and when as a window,
topped out the CPU usage at 7%. Minimised in the dock its running at
10%...weird huh?

Those sexy graphics with sliding drawers and drop shadows and
sophisticated metadata views don't come free..

Mind you I just looked in one of those sexy ._files and it took a whole
4096 allocation cluster to say.....

.....

.....
wait for it...

...
#cat ._lib.php

2??SMLdSMULATTR??d??xThis resource fork intentionally left
blank ??vault:/var/www/intranet

Yeah. REALLY useful:-)



And here I thought Linux's Enlightenment made for the most attractive
interface...but perhaps there's more to "best GUI" than appearance alone.

I have to say I've not seen that one. Try em both.

If all you want is to mess around with photos and movies, browse the
web, read e-mail and run MS office, then the mac is a hands down winnner.

Very reassuring to me, then. I don't even do movies, and I'm committed
to arriving at a computing environment free from all traces of M$ sw.
It'll come

Oh, I'll recommend the Mac for THAT unhesitatingly. It's a super TOY.



Happy computing,
Eric