Hi Harvey,

You hit on the one reason why personally (not in my day job mind you) I will
probably stick with PCs. As a hobbyist and confirmed hardware junky, nothing
beats wrenching on a clunky, steam-powered dinosaur PC. I won't mention the
number of PCs we currently have in our house, but it probably accounts for
more than half of our electrical outlay.

But (and it's a BIG but), for the masses I think Macs are gaining
(re-gaining?) favor. I'm sure we all remember when Apple II and then
Macintosh dominated. Spendy? Yes. But they know how to put the 'U' in Val-U.
Unlike a Dell (or HP as Rick pointed out), the 'extras' on a Macintosh are
damn good, functional extras that enhance the experience rather than annoy
it.

For a boat, the Mac mini seems like a home run. It has everything you need
from a PC AND entertainment. Add a 12v (or inverted) LCD and some good
speakers and you'll cover a lot of ground.

One question I do have for you, though, regarding your instrumentation. I'm
assuming you're talking data acquisition. Are these units available in USB
or Firewire? This, of course, would carry over to those considering a
computer for the boat. Most of the interfaces nowadays are USB or Firewire
and some are Ethernet. All of these solutions should work no problem with a
Mac using Boot Camp or maybe even Parallels. The problem with using PC based
software in a virtual environment (Parallels) is that the application has to
go through the Mac OS to get to the hardware layer. This can induce latency
and may not even work. However, Boot Camp accesses the hardware directly
just as on any PC.

Also for those looking at a PC from Dell or HP or one of the name brands,
keep in mind that a lot of their internal components are proprietary (i.e.
$$$) and PCI-e will soon be the only bus you'll see on these units as well
(Apple has always been 1-2 years ahead of the curve adopting great
technology).

Okay, I'll stop. At least for now until someone mentions computers or
stereos and stuff. [g]

Rick Beddoe
s/v Soņadora, 1978 Baba 30
Minneapolis, MN
http://sail2live.com
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-baba-l@ballreich.net [mailto:owner-baba-l@ballreich.net] On
Behalf Of Harvey J. Karten
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 6:10 PM
To: baba-l@ballreich.net
Subject: Re: [Baba-L] Greetings from Luddite Corners!

Hi Rick,
I quite agree. The new Intel Duo Macs are slick platforms for both OS X and
for Microsoft. I understand that the latest version of Parallels provides an

even smoother way of running Windows as a virtual machine on a Mac.
Unfortunately, for graphics applications, the virtual machine route
(Parallels) is about half as quick in running big graphics programs. But if
you run Boot Camp (directly from Apple) then it will run Windows in native
mode, and may even be faster than an equivalent CPU in an exclusively
Windows box. The downside is the requirement that you have to completely
reboot if using Boot Camp. But for programs such as MacENC, which doesn't
really require that much power computing, Parallels should be a fine
solution. You might not even notice that you are running your Windows based
programs as Virtual Machines.

The problem that we run into with Apple is their exclusive use of
PCI-Express cards. That locks us out of using the Macs as instrument
controllers that run under Windows with our expensive regular PCI controller

cards. More the pity, as the Mac Hardware is both robust and elegant, and
the notion of then being able to run a lot of the very high end techie UNIX
imaging software would otherwise make the choice of Apple a no-brainer.

I have been toying with the notion of getting a MacMini for the boat. I then

could run Windows for controlling the SSB-VFO, our old Marine Map Nav
software from Jeppessen, and then add on MacENC for use of vector graphics
charts and AIS.
Ah, toys, toys, toys.
Harvey

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Received on Mon Feb 19 19:44:19 2007