[sdiy] Bootcamp . Parallels/ off patch over priced Mac rubbish

[Olivier Gillet]

It's interesting to see how someone's definition of "real world
software" can be different from someone else's. My "real world"
involves storing, "intelligently" crunching, and serving (big) data.
Having to deal with MinGW or cygwin to get software to build,
scratching my head at bugs due to the non-availability of some POSIX
bits, crying at the lack of tool for installing software from source
repositories with their dependencies, dealing with lame I/O or network
performance (whether or not everything pass through AV software), and
a total lack of administration, configuration and monitoring tools...
One must be kidding, what kind of serious work can be done with this
thing? I gave up many years ago.

> Microsoft Windows XP Professional running Microsoft Office 2003 is the most reliable and most useful combination of tools for a computer.

"most reliable and most useful combination of tools for a computer?" I
thought this was the definition of a good old unix system with a
working C compiler and perl :)
Personally, I haven't had any practical use of Office-like software
since the late nineties...

At least, OS X gives you the choice to do creative "real work", office
"real work", web development "real work", science "real work",
development "real work" due to its similarities with the target system
of choice for data crunching and serving "real work". Maybe not much
of EE or CAD "real work", though, which could explain the bias seen
here. Maybe we're all just being bitter for the lack of great
simulation software, or because some chip manufacturer "forgot" to
port their compiler to another OS or were too lazy to implement it as
a back-end for a proved compiler framework...

So I totally understand why some people would want to buy Macs to run
OS X... The research department where I worked with recently switched
to OS X and it totally made sense to them.

Also, don't underestimate the amount of "real world work" that can now
routinely be done in a web browser. We're all arguing about windows
and OS X, while the future is WebKit :D Who'll be the first one to
build an online, collaborative, schematics capture and simulation
program linked to all the databases of part manufacturers and to a
central, community-edited, repository of useful schematics? There are
already online development tools for LPC microcontrollers after all:
http://mbed.org/handbook/Tour