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Forgive me for my sins

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    Forgive me for my sins

    Being a .Net architect, consultant and general Microsoft cronie generally, I ask for forgiveness.

    I just bought a Mac. This is because I am fed up of things like Patch Tuesday, Hardware ******* up, WGA, all the Vista hype, Visual studio 2005 being bloody unreliable etc.
    Serving religion with the contempt it deserves...

    #2
    Well that's you fecked then.

    Comment


      #3
      Hey it's dual booting windows XP thanks to boot camp so I can still screw people
      Serving religion with the contempt it deserves...

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        #4
        Originally posted by TheMonkey
        Visual studio 2005 being bloody unreliable etc.
        Works fine for me.

        New Mac laptops are Intel machines (I was saying for a long time that this switch is inevitable), so you can just double boot or even better - virtualise system and have Mac and Windows side by side at the same time.

        Come to think of virtualisation - anyone tried it? What's the CPU overheads like?

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          #5
          Originally posted by AtW
          Come to think of virtualisation - anyone tried it? What's the CPU overheads like?
          I've been using Xen on a production system for a good while. Basically I have Condor firing out jobs to a very large cluster of heterogeneous machines, and many of the machines are running Xen with differing versions of their native and Linux OSes on top. For example on one of the SGIs I've a box with 8 OSes each with it's own drive.

          When you submit a job you can say which CPU type, OS, all sorts, even steppings on the intel's, (or not bother and it tries and work it for itself, but that's another story), and it just takes it baby.

          Overhead? It is small enough, about 3% (+/- 1 depending on machine architecture), that with the advantages it gives, probably should make it a negative number.

          Also AtW, it's our 7 foot tall Georgian common acquaintance who helped set it up. So you could ask him for more in depth technical wot-sits.
          Insanity: repeating the same actions, but expecting different results.
          threadeds website, and here's my blog.

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by TheMonkey
            Being a .Net architect, consultant and general Microsoft cronie generally, I ask for forgiveness.
            You mean 'Developer' .....

            Everyone is a Consultant these days.

            And I am not prejudiced... I remember rolling out Centris 610's, Quadra 700's, 800's, Appleshare, System 6, System 7, the 'blessed' folder... SCSI everywhere... way ahead of PCs back then.

            It's interesting to see that Apple have finally moved to the Intel architecture. PowerPC had potential, but when Motorola threw out their Macs (about 40,000 worldwide) , stopped mainstream production of the chips and the only source was IBM, they should have seen the direction to take all those years ago.

            I remember installing 486 cards in Macs to allow dual boot. Personally I would rather use an Apple OS than Linux if I had to choose.
            Vieze Oude Man

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              #7
              Originally posted by mcquiggd
              Personally I would rather use an Apple OS than Linux if I had to choose.
              Yeah probably same here, MACs on x86 make far more sense. Andy Grove of Intel was canvassing Jobs every few years (for the last 15) tempting him to switch away from Motorola

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                #8
                I was with the Cellular Infrastructure Group of Motorola when they made the decision to replace Macs with PCs. At that point most of the top people had Powerbooks, and loved them. It was quite sad to see the internal decision making process - the case against using Macs was unsound. Adrian Nemcek was head of CIG at the time.. just look at him now... Forbes Profile ... he was actually one of my references at one point. Gulp.

                He used to be a Mac fanatic. Loved them to bits and always kept his hand in with the latest in Mac technology.

                I also made a mistake earlier in another post - it wasn't Harvard, it was MIT. The gent in question was Carl Pietrzak.. current bio ... both are incredibly smart guys.

                The chap who wrote the 'dodgy dossier' for switching to PC's was one Steven Bramson... who is a poster boy for Microsoft these days. Link
                Vieze Oude Man

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                  #9
                  I wouldn't have a Mac if it wasn't x86. I only bought one as the purchase risk is mitigated by the fact that it runs windows as well via Bootcamp.

                  AtW: Visual Studio 2005 is a complete bitch when you're working with threadpools for a hefty distributed load testing tool. VS.Net just doesn't handle it well.

                  As for Virtualisation, VMWare are going to target MacOS X so you can run windows in a window. Bring it on.

                  Having used PCs for approximately 20 years now, I'm used to a few bugs and some frustration. I've not got frustrated at ALL during the 12 hours I've been using this Mac. It just works, perfectly, predictably and reliably. It's the zen of computing (so far). Give it 6 months and I'll probably be beating it around like I do with my PCs.
                  Serving religion with the contempt it deserves...

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Well, who knows... I still have a lot of admiration for Apple.

                    Back in my younger years (cough!) I started off in tech support at a pretty major publishing company.. after a year it was just me and 400 Macs used by editorial, production, and design staff.. with 7 people supporting 1100 pc's at the same company using both day to day word processing packages and also finance software.

                    I would say that the most cutting edge of the company were the design teams... all the new technology was used there... back in the days of new optical disk formats (way before DVD), Quark Xpress conversions from a myriad of different formats you just don't want to know about, the concept of SGML (before it spawned XML), comparitively huge amounts of data (single image for a book with an original size of around 300 Mb from an outside agency and no CD burners!)... people designing fonts in-house, raster image processing and use of advanced tools to handle automatic replacement of image placeholders with full resolution content on output...

                    At that time, it was simply not possible with PCs. Now of course, it is more than possible, it is cheaper. But, I still admire a company that has such talent that they effectively enabled an entire industry.

                    They may well do it again... as it is not just Steve Jobs who is exceptionally talented at the firm.
                    Vieze Oude Man

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