ibooks for computer science switchers!
I'm trying to convince the computer science peeps to switch to ibooks. So far my reasons are Xcode built in, they dont have to pay for a good ide, plus the code can be recompiled in the lab if for some reason the prof wants a running copy. Then there is airport, we have wireless in most of the buildins on campus, but not in our room, no enet either!!!!
Panther's windows netowrking will defintaly be a seller, These all show hotw the mac can fit in, but now i need to justify the price. The big one is xcode and unix. Many of the freshman students have no idea about how to use a command line interface. plus all that stuf is free. 
what else can i use to help convice them to swtich. I cant use the whole photoshop thing cuz they frankly dont care.
I am telling them to download itunes since everyhing in panther is based off that ui. iphoto itunes, finder, xcode.
The games are fine, the fact that it comes with TH2 is a major plus apparently.
i think lack of viruses is another good idea.
can ne1 else think of good reasons to switch? besides "it doesnt crash"
id really like to not be the only undergrad with a mac at a school with 8k people.
Panther's windows netowrking will defintaly be a seller, These all show hotw the mac can fit in, but now i need to justify the price. The big one is xcode and unix. Many of the freshman students have no idea about how to use a command line interface. plus all that stuf is free. what else can i use to help convice them to swtich. I cant use the whole photoshop thing cuz they frankly dont care.
I am telling them to download itunes since everyhing in panther is based off that ui. iphoto itunes, finder, xcode.
The games are fine, the fact that it comes with TH2 is a major plus apparently.
i think lack of viruses is another good idea.
can ne1 else think of good reasons to switch? besides "it doesnt crash"
id really like to not be the only undergrad with a mac at a school with 8k people.
Comments
Originally posted by myahmac
The big one is xcode and unix. Many of the freshman students have no idea about how to use a command line interface. plus all that stuf is free.
what else can i use to help convice them to swtich. I cant use the whole photoshop thing cuz they frankly dont care.
I am telling them to download itunes since everyhing in panther is based off that ui. iphoto itunes, finder, xcode.
bash, tcsh, vi, pico, cat, grep, gcc, javac...
This simply cannot be underscored enough:
Hopefully Kickaha will chime in here. I recall he's mentioned that a good number of UNC's CSC staff members personally use PowerBooks.
http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.js...32&thread=7532
Followed closely by:
gcc -|
gdb |---- wrapped in XCode goodness
gprof -|
Objective-C For dynamic OO language experimentation, there's little better
InterfaceBuilder There are other similar tools out there, but this one is still the champ in my book. If you can grok how this, Cocoa and the Obj-C runtime interact, you've pretty much mastered OO... and it makes it easy to learn.
AFS -|
NFS |
LDAP |
Kerberos |
ActiveDirectory |
SAMBA -| ---------- these make integration with *any* networked system a breeze
Cocoa
Office (I hate to add it, but some profs demand it, and you can't run it on Linux)
How about the fact that every Mac ships with a generalized vector processing unit that is great for a parallel processing class?
...or that the dual units provide a nice experimentation platform for learning threaded multi-processor processing *without* a lot of pain?
...or that technologies like Rendezvous make distributed experiments a snap?
... let's see... vector processing, SMP, distributed... yup, that about covers the permutations.
The graphics and windowing system is cleanly designed and allows for things that are just plain impractical under Windows or Linux. Period. (We have one research project under patent filing right now, so I can't really talk about it, but my advisor spent *four months* trying to get a project up and running on Win2K and XP... even with the experts from the graphics subdepartment behind him, four FireWire boards, three digital cameras, and a lot of cussing, he finally realized it was just plain not possible under Windows, period, due to the architecture of the windowing system. I mocked up a demo in one night in 45 minutes on my then three year old Pismo laptop that did precisely what he wanted... and that included learning the API from the documentation. He's a switcher now.) That same project has spawned off two dissertation proposals, and we're looking at integrating other technologies such as Rendevouz that, while possible on other platforms, is just painful.
NOBODY offers this breadth of possibilities for the CS student except Apple. Our faculty had I think two Mac users out of about 30 three years ago. Now a full half of them sport 17" PowerBooks and love 'em.
Yeah, I could go on for hours.
Originally posted by myahmac
I'm trying to convince the computer science peeps to switch to ibooks. So far my reasons are Xcode built in, they dont have to pay for a good ide, plus the code can be recompiled in the lab if for some reason the prof wants a running copy. Then there is airport, we have wireless in most of the buildins on campus, but not in our room, no enet either!!!!
what else can i use to help convice them to swtich. I cant use the whole photoshop thing cuz they frankly dont care.
I am telling them to download itunes since everyhing in panther is based off that ui. iphoto itunes, finder, xcode.
The games are fine, the fact that it comes with TH2 is a major plus apparently.
i think lack of viruses is another good idea.
can ne1 else think of good reasons to switch? besides "it doesnt crash"
id really like to not be the only undergrad with a mac at a school with 8k people.
That sounds a lot like my school you just described there. I think I'm going to send the CS profs a pointer to this thread.
My school forces Apple iBooks on all art students and forces IBM ThinkPads on everybody else. I think the school should allow more choice in such matters and there should also be more department cooperation.
For example, I took a Calculus class and was required to get Maple installed on my computer. Maple is available for Windows, but not Mac OS X. However, if the department used Mathematica instead of Maple, they would get the same functionality in a software package that is available for both of the operating systems that are officially supported by the university. Simple decisions like this would make things run more smoothly for everybody. The fact that they do not do this makes many of the art students on campus feel ostracized.
The CS department would benefit from giving students the choice to use iBooks. Many students in the CS department currently install Linux onto their ThinkPads. That already says that Windows is not the best tool for a CS student. Many of the students using Linux run dual-boot configurations with Windows so they can run MS Office and other commercial software. When you consider the fact that CS students take some non-CS courses that require MS Word and other commercial software, it becomes clear that Linux isn't the best tool for a CS student either. Mac OS X offers CS students a unix foundation with all of the command line tools they need in addition to a solid GUI for running commercial software. It would provide the benefits of Windows and the benefits of Linux without requiring the hassle of a dual-boot configuration.
Mac OS X would open a lot of doors for the CS department. Students could do the Unix admin and network programming classwork on their own laptops. Objective C and Cocoa development could be added to the list of potential special topics courses, while existing special topics courses based on Windows-specific technology such as the MFC libraries could continue being done in the CS department's computer lab. I've been able to take all of the required CS courses using an Apple laptop, and I haven't run into any situations where I couldn't do what needed to be done. You should use the best tool for any given task, and Mac OS X is the best tool for the CS department.
For students whose classwork doesn't have any specific computer requirements, an iBook is also ideal because it provides the web, word processing, e-mail and other basic functionalities that all students need without the viruses, worms, and trojans that have been clogging the network and stressing out support staff since the beginning of the semester.
Unfortunately, I've talked to a student with an iBook who dropped CS 120 (the entry level Computer Science course) because his instructor told him to install Virtual PC and TextPad to compile java. BBEdit (a text editor the university includes on the iBooks) and javac should be good enough, but the instructor didn't know what BBEdit was or how to use javac on the command line. The way he described the situation, the instructor seemed unwilling or unable to help the student do this and kept insisting that he use Virtual PC and TextPad. Virtual PC is a terrible solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I believe that student, who is a freshman, is no longer a CS minor because of this.
A little knowledge and cooperation from the departments on campus and some choice for the students involved would do a lot to make things flow more smoothly for everybody. Unfortunately, it would be quite challenging to get such concepts through the bureaucratic hierarchy.
Not a GREAT reason, but I just did in about 3 minutes what would have taken me 5 hours and many errors to do otherwise. (simple find tabs, replace them with a space and write out to a new file - in a 20000 line text file. That would have choked anything but BBEdit. And it was free.)
Originally posted by Kickaha
Feh. Python.
Too phallic for me. It may do to suit your needs though.
Originally posted by Kickaha
Office (I hate to add it, but some profs demand it, and you can't run it on Linux)
ahem. it may not be the prettiest, but it'll do just about everything you need an office program to do. and it wont set you back several hundred dollars (its free).
For those rare times when I absolutely, positively need Office for some silly reason, I find OpenOffice to be more trouble than its worth.
Besides, even though it's sucking at the MS teat, UNC has a licensing deal where students get Office for $10. Can't beat that. (And no, OpenOffice's $10 less doesn't make up for the fits it causes when I use it.)
Originally posted by Kickaha
UNC has a licensing deal where students get Office for $10.
Hope this isn't too far off topic. Due to the California budget problems, at my California State University campus, MS Office with the campus agreement is $68. I think it was $25 last year, when the school subsidized the students by paying the license fee.
Originally posted by rogue27
I took a Calculus class and was required to get Maple installed on my computer. Maple is available for Windows, but not Mac OS X.
While it's too late for your Calculus class, Maple 9 is now available for OS X.
Originally posted by Skipjack
While it's too late for your Calculus class, Maple 9 is now available for OS X.
That is nice to hear. Now it's just a matter of convincing the Math department that they should buy a Mac license for Maple to support the students with iBooks.
Oh, did I just make that sound trivial? Silly me.
I saw that some one mentioned perl, i thought that was a web scipting language, or is it general purpose? I know there are some OO programs based on pyhton, likt BT.
BTW the only thing i could think of that would be weird is the x86 assembally class
Originally posted by myahmac
wow, this is great! I am just a sophomore, so allive had is the basics, but i like to try to do more than given. What kind of scripting would a higher level cs student be interested in?
perl. It's not just for cgi. It does really well for large text processing, for example. It can recursively search through your entire HD for a string, if you want. It's saved my ass on several occasions.
Originally posted by myahmac
BTW the only thing i could think of that would be weird is the x86 assembly class
I didn't know schools were still teaching X86 assembly language. (I have a whole library of X86 books, but not from any class I took.)
Both schools I've attended recently have moved to MIPS to introduce assembly language. If your class uses MIPS, search for SPIM-6.5 (I think you can get it with fink), which you can run from your terminal, or there's a nice, but old version that can be run in Classic. (I say nice because I think it's better than the Windows version and also nicer than the (X11?) version.)
Originally posted by myahmac
wow, this is great! I am just a sophomore, so allive had is the basics, but i like to try to do more than given. What kind of scripting would a higher level cs student be interested in?
I saw that some one mentioned perl, i thought that was a web scipting language, or is it general purpose? I know there are some OO programs based on pyhton, likt BT.
BTW the only thing i could think of that would be weird is the x86 assembally class
Maybe your x86 assembly class will be done in a lab with a bunch of old computers?
Perl can be used for scripting on your own machine, it can be used for web scripts, and it can be used to write little utilities to make redundant tasks a bit less... redundant. It is currently next on my list of things to learn.
Originally posted by myahmac
BTW the only thing i could think of that would be weird is the x86 assembally class
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to buy a cheap PC for exactly this reason in another couple months. The department here claims that emulators such as Virtual PC return incorrect instruction counts. There's no way in hell I'm going to trek all the way out to some lab to do my work every day.
Feh.