OT: Who runs and prefers.....

MAC's ?

I know all the software we use is for windows, but after getting more and more depressed with the windows blue screens and driver issues i decided to get for home use (surfing, mail, photos, ipod etc) a mac...

Bought a mac min yesterday to run on the tv...

So far i think apart from being a tiny cute silent box its really really good !

Anyone use macs or prefer them ?

I've just started using one , at this stage it seems OK hav'nt played with it on-line yet..

For me it really depends on what I am doing.

I mainly use Windows bassed systems on a daily basis. (Programming, Development, Surfing, etc) I couldn't tell you the last time I had a blue screen.

I do use macs for video and audio editing. Thinking about doing web development on mac as well from now on.

Really depends on what you want to do with it and what software you want to use. I know some people who are Diehard Mac people, Diehard Linux, or Diehard Windows. I use all of them

I also use ubuntu, very nice..

Set up my mac on my wireless, took just around an hour....

1 minute to put the wpa2 key into the mac wifi setup to connect

59 minutes to reboot my windows machine 1 times after word locked it up to get at the word document with my wifi password on it!!!

It was almost like i bought the mac into the house and the windows machine got a sniff of it (like a new cat v's the old cat!) and said bugger this im gonna play difficult and get grumpy!

Dua Anjing said:

I've just started using one , at this stage it seems OK hav'nt played with it on-line yet..

Click to expand...

Tell me is that Step7 running on OsX ?

I have a MacPro at work and two Mac Minis at home

I just upgraded my MacPro to VMWare's Fusion and I have 4 virtual machines. I have Win98, Ubuntu64, WinXP for PLC programming, and WinXP for non PLC work.

I can run Step7 on the VM.

On the Macs I use wxMaxima. wxMaxima is one of my main tools. wxMaxima works on windows too.

I also have Entourage that came with MS Office 2008. The Excel version is crippled relative to the Windows version. Entourage allows me to access the companies mail exchange server.

Macs seem to multi task much better than Windows machines and WinXP runs more reliably on a VM. I think it is the better drivers that VMWare supplies. I hate the way Windoze seems to go to sleep and still the CPU is almost idling. That tells me that Windoze is waiting on I/O. The Windoze may need to wait for I/O but it shouldn't stop. A multitasking system should go to the next task which is usually me banging on the key board trying to shut down the dead task.

There is some cool unix software installed on your Mac. Python and numpy, php, java, tck/tk etc. Python and numpy look like a good alternative to Scilab.

Mac programs hang up too but it is easy to force quit.

I do keep a Windoze machine around for playing games.

504bloke said:

I also use ubuntu, very nice..

Click to expand...

I just updated my Ubuntu to 9.1 Suhweeeeet! I'm almost tempted to take my brand new laptop and make Ubuntu the host OS and make windows 7 run in the VM instead of the other way around.

I had to laugh about how MS has been bragging about Win7 being the fix for all past problems, and then this morning hear on the radio how it is having prolific screen of death problems. I wonder how much longer the MS monopoly will continue? Its too bad that Apple is still trying to be a hardware company instead of trying to go head to head with MS on operating systems.

I haven't had a Mac in 10 years.
I had three of them years ago.
Original Mac 128, a Mac+ (Remember HyperCard?)
The last one I owned was a Centris 650.


I have a question.
Do Macs nowadays come with a Right Mouse Button out of the box?
Back in the day, they didn't.
The Right click function in Excel is one of the reasons that I bought a PC 10 years ago.

504bloke said:

Tell me is that Step7 running on OsX ?

Click to expand...

Yes, the hint is in the fifth icon from the left (between Thunderbird and Gimp) it's VMWare's FUSION running in "unity" mode. It let's me run Windoze and Mac from the one (mac) desktop.

gbradley, see the new "Multitouch" mice, way more than one button...
http://www.apple.com/magicmouse/

I'm a mac user at home, too, but no experience w/ VMs to do PLC work in XP on the Mac yet.

Dua Anjing said:

Yes, the hint is in the fifth icon from the left (between Thunderbird and Gimp) it's VMWare's FUSION running in "unity" mode. It let's me run Windoze and Mac from the one (mac) desktop.

Click to expand...

Does it run Logix ? GX Developer ?

I am getting excited !!!

Im thinking keep the windoze for my flight sim games

!!

gbradley said:

I haven't had a Mac in 10 years.
I had three of them years ago.
Original Mac 128, a Mac+ (Remember HyperCard?)
The last one I owned was a Centris 650.


I have a question.
Do Macs nowadays come with a Right Mouse Button out of the box?
Back in the day, they didn't.
The Right click function in Excel is one of the reasons that I bought a PC 10 years ago.

Click to expand...

Nope.
That's right they still don't.
But my microsoft usb mouse works fine letting me right click to my hearts content. And by the way Excel for mac isn't worth the effort better of running either Openoffice of just run the real excel in a vm.

504bloke said:

Does it run Logix ? GX Developer ?

I am getting excited !!!

Im thinking keep the windoze for my flight sim games

!!

Click to expand...

Don't know about those two but as yet most of teh apps I have tried have been OK. Have a look at VMwares web-site , I think you can download a 30 day trial of VMware fusion, pretty sure that there are probably other apps out there but I'm happy with VMware at this stage.

I just got a new box for the office that I do pretty much everything except the PLC programming on and I is running Ubuntu as the base operating system with Windows XP SP3 under VirtualBox for those Windows apps that I haven't managed to part with. The VirtualBox instead of VMWare was at the recommendation of Paul over at MrPLC in the Windows 7 thread. It has some good information on doing this. Also VirtualBox is part of Ubuntu's standard available software.

It is working very well and I do plan on doing this to my next programming laptop if I don't find any bad pitfalls. So far I have found this setup seems to make Windows much more stable

EDIT - Forgot to mention that being part of Ubuntu's package, VirtualBox is free

Wait!!

Dua Anjing said:

Nope.
That's right they still don't.

Click to expand...

One one of my minis has a mighty mouse. It looks like a simple one button mouse but it can tell the difference between clicking on the left and right side so it is a two button mouse for all practical purposes. The mighty mouse also has a small scroll ball that works well as long as it is kept clean. There are two other buttons on the side that are activated when you squeeze them.


504bloke, how do you use you mini with a TV. I have thought about an Elgato Eye TV to record information.
http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/buy.en.html