On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 04:51:21PM -0800, Warren DeLano wrote: > The Quadro FX 4500-based PowerMac G5 is Steve Jobs' timely and direct > answer [...] > The UNIX-based Mac has become the robust, low-cost, well-supported, and > high-performance replacement for SGI workstations that Linux never > delivered despite nearly a decade of opportunity and effort (including > our own). Why does Linux fail with visualization? [...] > History shows that it takes an integrated hardware & operating systems > vendor like Apple (or formerly SGI, or Sun) to deliver and maintain > trouble-free OpenGL under UNIX. Apple is the world's leading UNIX > vendor, and unlike with Linux, Mac hardware and operating systems are > continuously integrated with cutting-edge OpenGL graphics cards.
> Has Apple in fact given us what you asked for? If so, then have you > followed through with purchases? If not, then what are you waiting for? > Is something crucial still missing? Please share your thoughts. We > guarantee that Apple and others will hear them. Despite the OpenGL workstation niche having been a yawning chasm for several years now, it took the concerted begging to get Apple to respond to that niche. While congratulations in getting Apple to respond are still in order, this blatant shilling contrasts jarringly with the open source context in which PyMOL is developed, distributed, and supported: PyMOL is attractive in part because it promises long-term, flexible access to the tools to do our work, without users falling into a vassal role with respect to one industry-dominant company. Launching such a hyperbolic cheerleading campaign may belie the stability of the support one might expect from Apple for this technology, if one feels such campaigns are necessary to keep that support alive. It seems premature, at best, to extrapolate from Apple's welcome, but very few and very recent, product releases to describe their support as "timely", "robust", "well-supported", "trouble-free" and "continuously-integrated". Only with time can one make those claims fairly. It seems they and their developer and user communities will have their hands full with the upcoming hardware architecture migrations, during which support for many different niches might lag behind or fall by the wayside. While one may hope they can pull it and keep it all together, let's not get ahead of ourselves: The list of Apple's predecessors in this niche, rather than being complimentary to Apple should serve as a sobering reminder of the difficulties Apple faces, and as a warning against hitching one's scientific productivity yet again to just one star. As for specifics of our own purchases, our purchase cycle had us replacing hardware early last summer, before the indicated hardware was available. So, it doesn't seem to be a question of "what are you waiting for" so much as asking Apple "what took you so long?". For this round, their support came too late, even though they've been trading for years on their claims of support for creative endeavors (cf publicity of the Genentech orders of the original G4 iMac). Our next crack at it will probably come well after the migration to a Intel-based architecture is complete. As it is, we had to wait a year more than I'd have liked for funding, which put us in the position of having to navigate the replacement of hardware alongside a major release of the operating system (MacOS 10.4). That brought with it additional support problems, notably a lag (or complete drop in) support for MacOS from other third-party developers, which issues we're still working through. Whatever the problems behind OpenGL support for Linux, entreaties to abandon it will not help convince Linux integrators or graphics vendors to support this niche. In terms of choice and pricing, this will benefit neither Linux users nor Mac users. Rather, what it does is re-animate the long dormant internecine Unix Wars of the days of old. We've been through that, and we know how it turns out. For those who missed it the first time, it doesn't benefit Apple, nor users of any other Unix-like operating system. -- D. Joe
