On 02/28/2013 05:21 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 05:58:36PM -0800, Yasha Karant wrote:
>>
>> There are significant issues with a Mac.
>>
>> The software issues can be addressed from the fink download site
>> (there are others) that provide all of the standard open systems tools
>> and many of the environments.
>>
>
> "yum install" is replaced by "fink", "ports/packages/etc". no issue here. (most of the time you get newer versions compared to SL6+EPEL6)
>
>>
>> However, not only is Mac hardware (much) more
>> expensive
>>
>
> you pay the extra money for the privilege of not having to read this mailing list. money well spent, AFAIC.
>
>>
>> the I/O ports are not as standard as on a properly
>> specified professional laptop (for a fixed desktop workstation with
>> enough PCI slots, this is never a problem), and typically require
>> special adapters/dongles.
>>
>
> "not as standard"? "properly specified professional laptop"?
>
> Can you be more specific, latest Macbook Air and Macbook Pro Retina
> are missing what I/O ports? (We are still talking about Linux laptops here,
> right? Or you want to bring in desktops, servers, and specialized,
> e.g. DAQ machines, too?)
>
> (To remind all, we are still on topic here - if SL were perfect, Mac would be unecessary
> and Apple would be out of business).
>
>> ... the internal [Mac] "engine" is BSD and does work ...
>
> Unfortunately, Apple have not been investing into the BSD engine
> and in many ways it is severely behind the leading edge of OS functions,
> design and performance compared to recent Linux kernels and even
> to the remaining BSDs. For me, most missing are the latest POSIX
> extensions to PTHREADS, to POSIX semaphores and to POSIX shared memory,
> e.g. complete lack of "ls /dev/shm" function.
>
Modern BSD is a micro-kernel ("MACH") design, whereas Linux still is a 
monolithic kernel design.  A micro-kernel design has intrinsic design 
advantages over a monolithic design, all other things being equal. 
Often, this advantage is not realized in production because of either 
poor implementations (the intrinsic gains of a micro-kernel are 
eliminated because of a very inefficient implementation) or because of 
poor quality control.  In addition, the actual deployment of, say, BSD 
that often is built entirely from source may be much more cumbersome 
than using downloadable pre-built packages (e.g., RPM, deb, etc.).  I 
concur that Apple is lagging behind some other BSD derivatives; however, 
Apple may make the argument that this is for stability and reliability, 
much as EL lags (well) behind Fedora.

Yasha Karant