[BiO BB] Macintosh

Corentin Cras-Méneur crasmen at magic.fr
Tue Jan 15 03:59:20 EST 2002


At 14:57 -0500 14/01/02, FREDERICK TAN wrote:
>Good afternoon,
>
>. I was wondering how many people out there were using Macintosh as a
>supplementary computing platform.  I am considering the purchase of a
>Macintosh (in addition to the Win32/Linux/SGI machines) for the purposes
>of:

I am.

>- presentation machine
>- part-time mobile computational analysis
>- light administrative tasks (MS Office essentially)
>
>. My questions lie along four major questions:
>
>1) How to compare the performance of the PowerPC G3/G4 chips with that of
>the Intel based 80x86 chips

I am delighted with my G4. It is very hard to compare processors as 
performances greatly vary depending on the application you use. I 
only have one thing to say, people using wintel machines in my lab 
envy my TiBook :-)

>2) The basis of Mac OS X/Darwin (is this a true Unix flavored
>implementation, able to compile and run existing Unix applications);

Yes. No doubt about this. ClustalW is faster that ever in the 
terminal. I run Unix and Perl programs al the time.

>  on
>the same lines a) will this machine be able to run basic sequence analysis
>packages (phylip, clustalx, etc)

Yep.

>and molecular modeling software (RasMol,
>Chime, etc)

I never tried these so I couldn't tell.

>  and b) how much support does Mac OS X have for emulating a
>Win32VM?

    VirtualPC 5 is supposed to be MacOS X native (carbon) but I don't 
use it. I've used previous releases under MacOS 9. It worked just 
fine but I had no real use of it since all the application I needed 
exist as native MacOS Applications.

>3) Interoperatability with existing networks-- how much trouble will I
>have trying to interface with two SGI Octanes and a host of other Windows
>XP systems (as well as a non postscript HP laser printer)

MacOS X can use NFS and Samba. The implementation is not as "obvious" 
as AppleTalk but it works just fine. If you need better networking 
support (and Windows based printers and so on) I'd recommend Dave 
from Thursby software. Vist their web site, it says it all.
http://www.thursby.com/products/dave.html

>4) Any suggested configurations for the iBook/PowerBook?

It depends on how much you are willing to spend and what applications 
you'll use.
    I'd recommend tons of RAM.

>. Thank you in advance.
>
>Sincerely,
>Frederick Tan
>

		Corentin



More information about the BBB mailing list