Re: Macs in Astronomy Updated; Canon 20D under Mac & Windows

From: Chris L Peterson (clp_at_alumni.caltech.edu)
Date: 03/01/05 

Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:52:19 GMT

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 19:16:22 -0500, Davoud <star@sky.net> wrote:

>You could be the only person in the world that has ever said that. As a
>consultant to both Mac and Windows users, I would be interested to know
>what kind of instability you are seeing on the Mac, and what software
>packages are causing the instability. (I see a lot of Macs, and I've
>never seen an unstable one running OS X.

My Mac crashes spontaneously once every few days, even with nothing
running except the usual support processes. My experience with OS X is
generally worse than it was with OS 9, which doesn't surprise me since I
don't consider Unix in general to be a particularly well designed OS. OS
X crashes under Mozilla when certain pages are accessed (same with my
Linux box). When I'm doing software development (which is all I use the
machine for regularly) it isn't uncommon for crashes to propagate to the
kernel, and take down the whole OS. This is with both my GNU C compiler
and my ABSOFT compiler debug environments. A friend down the road who
develops special ed software exclusively for the Mac finds his
(multiple) systems moderately unstable, too. Also, I see many Mac apps
that are not very well written. Crashes are quite common (no damage to
the system, but the local process terminates). App crashes under XP are
rare.

I wouldn't say that Macs are crash prone- nothing like, say, Windows 98
and earlier. But they are nowhere near as stable as my W2K and XP
machines, which are really abused by the development environment I work
in, and which essentially never crash. My XP workstations run for weeks
on end without problems.

I've never had any experience with viruses or spyware. I find Windows
quite resistant to such. The vast majority of malware seems to depend on
the ignorance of the operator to be manually activated, and there is no
shortage of computer ignorance out there- in both Mac and Windows users.
The same sorts of exploits used to trick Windows users would be
generally effective on Macs, too, if anyone bothered to write them.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

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