10 May
2007
10 May
'07
11:13 a.m.
On 5/10/07, Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> wrote:
On 10/05/2007 17:47, Ethan Dicks wrote:
In terms of aggregate market-share and hardware vendors' planning, it
might as well be. :-(
As most of us have experienced, it doesn't
take much to break
"age-similar". Yes, I would expect that if I go out *today* and buy
any USB disk or printer and plug it into any PC bought *today* running
an OS I can buy or download *today*, it should "just work".
Hmm... but the whole world's not a PC (nor even a Vax :-))
I learned C on an 11/750 running 4.1BSD... "all the world's a VAX"
really means something to me. It was, um, a secondary education when
I went from C programming on UNIX on a VAX to embedded C on a 68000
with our own home-rolled clib. Fortunately, I had plenty of M68K
assembler experience to make heads-or-tails of what was going on.
A few weeks
ago I bought a few USB serial port adapters, and they work fine on a
variety of PCs running various versions of Windows. Not, though, on a
Mac, which doesn't even see them.
Yeah... I have yet to take the plunge and buy any USB serial adapters
for just that reason - for me, they have to work with Windows
(laptops), Linux, _and_ Mac OS X, or I don't care if they are $2 or
$10 each... they aren't going to cut it.
I'm faced with getting a new company-paid laptop later this year. I'm
now trying to decide between "whatever hardware is being provided by
internal IT" and replacing Vista with RedHat Linux, or taking the
plunge and going with some form of Macbook. My job is 100% Linux, so
I'd _rather_ be running it on my desk, but given the stuff that's
available new as a "standard laptop", since they aren't hardware
compatible with what was available even 2 years ago (no
PCMCIA/Cardbus, no serial, no parallel, no PATA, no PS/2...), I might
as well get a Mac (I've already asked if I can get my old laptop back
- no answer yet).
I haven't done any software dev on a Mac, but at least with Linux, I
know I can write device drivers from scratch (having done it for VMS
and Ultrix, I don't find the process too scary, just fiddly).
-ethan