Jerry says something nice about the Mac.
Jerry Pournelle has always been pretty negative about the Mac. He's softened a bit over the years. Here's a recent example. This appears to be written by "Roland", one of his minions, but the last sentence seems to be Jerry.
The old saw about things being either very easy or simply impossible on the Mac is no longer valid, sir.
There's nothing meaningful one can name which is impossible on the Mac, anymore, since they rewrote the OS (OS/X) atop the FreeBSD *NIX variant.
I issue an open challenge to any of your readers to come up with -one significant task- which is impossible to accomplish using a Mac, but which can be done under Windows or Linux.
Which I suspect is more or less true. On the other hand, many years ago I said I didn't really want to have to learn to grep: UNIX was designed to be obscure, a full employment act for Gurus. So it may still be true for most of us that it's either easy or impossible, with the side note that you can get a wizard to do the impossible...
I'll be getting a 15" Mac pretty soon now. Thanks to all who subscribed or renewed subscriptions for making that possible.
Posted by jghiii at October 31, 2003 08:11 AM