From: Raymond Wiker on
JAM <ja_1410(a)yahoo.com> writes:

> On Nov 12, 11:37 am, Michael J. Schülke <n...(a)mjschuelke.de> wrote:
>> JAM schrieb:
>>
>> > I know Macs are in fashion especially for art students who do not need
>> > HP50g in general. It is not very smart however for engineering
>> > students to use Macs.
>>
>> As a physicist, I don't profess to know much about engineers or
>> engineering students. I do know, however, that computer scientists and
>> and (computational) physicists were among the first to switch when OS X
>> came out, generally to cries of "Finally, a UNIX with a decent
>> desktop"...
>>
>> Regards,
>> Michael
>
> Micheal
>
> To be fair, in the past most engineering applications were run on
> Unix. CAD, CAE, you name it. However Office was practically always
> Microsoft since I remember (last 20 years or so). It created a
> situation that many engineers were running two computers - Unix
> workstation for engineering applications and Windows desktop or
> recently laptop for office communication etc. This put pressure on
> software companies to rewrite it's software in Windows. Now almost
> every modern application in CAE od CAD is Windows based any many of
> those companies are abandoning or completely abandoned Unix. Fact is
> Mac or any other operating system will never have in many yeas in the
> future anywhere near in quantity and quality of available software as
> Windows based machines are enjoying. That is Why Mac was forced
> finally to dual boot into Windows not the other way around :-)

You're plain wrong, or at least several years out of date...

The situation now is that many people have a Windows PC for
work, which they only use because that is what they get given for
work. Meanwhile, at home, they use Macs.

Office is not a good reason for using a PC at home, and given
that you can actually get good, free alternatives, it is not even a
reason for using Windows for work purposes.

Further, many of the companies that switched from Unix to
Windows are now looking at Mac OS X and Linux; either for better
stability and performance, better security or simply for cost reasons.

From: A.L. on
On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:20:00 +0100, Raymond Wiker <raw(a)RAWMBP-2.local>
wrote:

>
>
> Further, many of the companies that switched from Unix to
>Windows are now looking at Mac OS X and Linux; either for better
>stability and performance, better security or simply for cost reasons.

Really?...

A.L.
From: Eric Rechlin on
<datajerk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> As I surveyed coffee shops and the library I
> estimated about 2/3 of the students had Macs.

That's because once you pay the Apple tax to buy a Mac, you have no money
left over for Internet access, so you have to go to coffee shops and
libraries to use their free Internet access. :)

The truth is, for most people computers are interchangeable as applications
no longer matter to them, so they can use any operating system (Windows,
Macintosh, Linux, etc) equally well. As long as they can bring up a web
browser (email included) and have applications for typing stuff and
listening to music and organizing photos, they can do anything they care
about. And even these last three categories are making their way to the
web, becoming platform independent as well (Google Docs, Flickr/Picassa,
Pandora, etc).

We're even seeing this more with hardware, too, as more products adopt
standard interfaces. So many devices these days don't even need a special
driver -- plug in your USB flash drive, your digital camera, your phone, or
any number of other devices, and it Just Works. All can be treated as
generic USB mass storage devices for easy drag-and-drop of files on any
modern OS.

If only the HP 50g worked this way -- can you imagine how much more friendly
it would be if you plugged in your calculator and saw two more drives show
up -- "SD Card Reader" and "Flash Drive" -- to let you copy data to and from
your calculator using any computer with no special drivers?

The 50g would also work well without special drivers if it implemented its
USB with a standard USB to serial interface. Many standard USB to serial
adapters, such as those based on the FTDI chips, are totally "plug and play"
on every computer I have tried (Windows XP and Vista and modern versions of
Linux) with no special drivers needed. But then it would show up as a
serial device (just like the old HP 48!) rather than a mass storage device,
which may or may not be as useful

Microsoft temporarily dropped support for legacy (16-bit) software with
64-bit Windows, but I believe that is back now with Windows 7's built-in
seamless virtualization. This was presumably after an outcry by business
users who still needed to use software that was >15 years old and no longer
ran on Vista (the first widely-available 64-bit Microsoft OS). On the other
hand, because of Apple's target market (mostly those people I refer to in
the previous paragraph), they can get away with dropping support for legacy
applications every 5 years or so and nobody cares.

I still do too much stuff that I need a real computer for, which is why I
run Windows, but I know that for most people's needs, they can sit down in
front of any computer, no matter what the platform, and be equally
productive given a web browser and a couple basic applications.

Regards,

Eric Rechlin

From: Philip J. Fry on
MS vs. Apple in a calc discussion? How did we come to this? I really
dislike these kind of stories.

Fry
From: John H Meyers on
On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:37:42 -0600, Michael J. Sch�lke wrote:

> As a physicist, I don't profess to know much about engineers or
> engineering students. I do know, however, that computer scientists and
> and (computational) physicists were among the first to switch
> when OS X came out, generally to cries of
> "Finally, a UNIX with a decent desktop"...

Got Cygwin?

Cygwin is like Linux, running within... Windows!

http://www.cygwin.com/

Free.

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