Re: [PLUG] AMD or Intel P4??

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 09:11:22AM -0400, Paul wrote:
> Availability,

Have you noticed what Universities seem to be phasing out lately?
(Granted, I've gotten more alphas than macppcs from swarthmore.edu
lately, but only because I've got plenty of PowerPC hardware as it
is.)

In any case, there are plenty of perfectly useable Macs available on
eBay and from plenty of regular resellers. Old Mac hardware is far
more likely to still be in working order, and to stay that way for
quite a while, since it was of higher manufacture quality to begin
with. (I base this on my personal experience, and I've dealt with
plenty of used machines of both architectures, as well as a variety
of others.)

> simplicity,

You're trying to suggest that anything about IA32 is simpler than a
PowerPC? What would that be, exactly? The instruction set? The
hardware buses in typical use? The BIOS design and user interface?

> compatibility,

Compatibility with what? I can do anything on a Mac that you can do
on Windows with the exception of games. And I can probably get
better performance out of the things that a GUI's actually useful
for (anything Adobe makes, but s,Adobe PageMaker,Quark Express,) on
a Mac than you can on a PC.

As for the open source side of things, if the application's not
portable, the author probably made enough other idiotic mistakes
that you don't want to use it anyway.

> and price

Used hardware's cheap. And Macs have been long-proven to stay in use
(and keep working right) longer than PC hardware. So the entrance
cost is higher, but the replacement schedule is longer. It evens
out.

> are major factors.

FUD.

IA32 is bad design, and that's *not* FUD. Why must you fight with
obtuse BIOSes that obscure functionality from the user (or make it
entirely impossible to change!)? Why must you still fight with lame
IRQ assignment problems? Why must you cut your hands on
easy-to-engineer-for-but-difficult-to-use AT[X] cases?

Turns out you don't have to, and better stuff's been out there for
quite a while. (And not just Macs, but Suns, SGIs, NeXTs...)

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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