Hi
My two ha'porth.
For a laptop, this is the clincher for me - if you want to use your
laptop anywhere that has reasonable light levels (e.g. demonstrating
to anyone in an exhibition hall), you may well find that the beautiful
shiny mirror that Apple put on the front of their screens on most of
their laptops makes your investment almost useless in reasonable
levels of ambient light. Unless I could buy a Macbook with a matt
screen I doubt I'd want to buy another one.
Sometimes I wonder if my Macbook was "designed in California in a
cave" to paraphrase what it says on the sticker on the back...
It runs all the software I want it to without problems, though,
including WIndows stuff via wine or VMWare. And I do *really* like OSX
as an interface.
On 9 Aug 2012, at 16:18, Andreas Förster wrote:
Mind that if you buy a MacBook, there's only one (hefty 15") model
without a mirror-coated screen.
Andreas
On 09/08/2012 3:58, Nat Echols wrote:
On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Jacob Keller
<j-kell...@fsm.northwestern.edu> wrote:
one. Are there any really reasonable arguments for preferring Mac
over
windows (or linux) with regard to crystallography? What can Mac/
Linux do
that windows cannot (especially considering that there is Cygwin)?
What
wonderful features am I missing?
Mac vs. Linux: mostly a matter of personal preference, but I agree
with Graeme. Most programs run equally well on either - with Coot a
partial exception, apparently due to problems with the X11
implementation (but once you get used to these, it's not a big deal).
Windows, on the other hand, simply doesn't support the full range of
modern crystallography software. And in my experience, it has
crippling flaws that mean some programs will always work better on
Mac/Linux. I wouldn't ever endorse trying to use Windows for serious
scientific computing unless you need to run an application that won't
work on any other OS, and as far as I know there isn't a single
(macromolecular) crystallography program that falls into this
category.
-Nat
Harry
--
Dr Harry Powell, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC Centre,
Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QH
