gnat writes "Registration is now open for the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference. Look for sessions by Randal Schwartz and brian d foy ("Programming Perl on Mac OS X"), Dan Sugalski ("Programming Cocoa with Perl"), David Wheeler ("Migrating from Linux to Mac OS X"), and many other people from the world of Perl."
All the MacOS X talk that combine words like Aqua, Darwin, Cocoa, and Perl, has me salivating to try it. Alas, the price on the top-end G3 machines is pretty high, so I've been thinking of taking the plunge with an iBook.
Now, the question for all those who've tried it: does your "average" iBook have enough horsepower to program the neat goodies? Can I, say, write a nifty QuickTime editor thingie using Perl with Cocoa, and actually have it run well? (The adjective I'm looking for isn't "blazing" but "decent".)
I noticed one of the conference sessions is called "Building a cheap ugly Mac" (i.e., using off-the-shelf parts), but I think for my first dive into the Mac waters I'd prefer to pay extra for a unit with an Apple warranty....
Re:Do iBooks have the horsepower?
Elian on 2002-07-30T16:25:13
An average iBook works just fine. OSCON was littered with them, and I know my iBook has power to burn. A quick check of the apple store also notes that it's now the absolute lowest-end iBook that you can get. (Actually, looking at the video specs, I think it's below the lowest end now)
As a point of reference, the 600MHz iBook with crappy video card (crappier than what's now sold) plays DVDs with about a 50% CPU utilization. You should be fine for pretty much anything you need to do.CamelBones (Was: Do iBooks have the horsepower?)
wickline on 2002-07-31T18:09:03
say...
any chance we'll find your camelbones slides on the web later?
-matt
Re:CamelBones (Was: Do iBooks have the horsepower?
Elian on 2002-07-31T18:41:56
Maybe, I'm not sure. It's a tutorial session, and there's balancing out the niceties of having the slides available against the possible hit to the book sales and potential training gigs later on. We'll see. (Which probably really means "I'll end up so overwhelmed with other stuff that I'll release 'em because I won't ever be doing anything else with the things":) Re:CamelBones (Was: Do iBooks have the horsepower?
nicholas on 2002-08-01T08:49:34
against the possible hit to the book sales and potential training gigs later onWhich is important, as training and consulting was your preferred way of funding your continuing parrot development role. So maybe it's better if you have the potential training gigs sooner on.
:-) Alternatively, we need to figure out how to send more credit cards in this direction
Re:Do iBooks have the horsepower?
ask on 2002-07-31T01:25:38
I am happily using Mac OS X on my ancient (+2 years) 500MHz Firewire Powerbook. It has 384MB ram which probably is about the minimum you want.
- ask (waiting for the next major revision tibook to upgrade)
Re:just remember...
ziggy on 2002-07-30T16:39:57
For those who weren't at OSCon or didn't bring an iBook/TiBook/PowerBook:We set up a photo shoot in one of the ballrooms on Thursday morning, and took a few posed shots of geeks with their iBooks. The pictures may come out, or they may not. We'll just have to wait and see what kind of magic Julian (SuperSnail) can do.
It just so happened that we were in the ballroom where Daniel Veillard was scheduled to speak after the break. Daniel, coming from the tribe of Free Software and Gnome, was particularly incensed that we were (1) giving free advertising to a big company like Apple, (2) supporting proprietary hardware and software, (3) supporting a company that relies upon patents (which also prevent really good antialiasing in Gnome, apparently), and (4) other random who-cares-if-its-unix-it's-not-free issues.
Re:just remember...
koschei on 2002-07-31T00:14:39
Bah. Acorn had good AA back in the early nineties. And they didn't have patents.
Re:just remember...
nicholas on 2002-07-31T10:55:06
Bah. Acorn had good AA back in the early nineties. And they didn't have patents.But they did have a documented implementation out in the public domain by 1988. Some of which would have been physcially shipped to the US (which I understand may be important in US patent law, which possibly only considers prior art that is available in the US) [IIRC including 1 Microsoft employee. google groups on comp.sys.acorn.programmer may remember better]
So, is any of it useful enough as prior art to knock out the Apple patents? Or at least reduce the claims sufficiently that gnome is happy?
Or does Debian just need to merge non-free with the main tree, and put everything else into non-US?
:-) Re:just remember...
jhi on 2002-07-31T03:08:27
particularly incensed doesn't really convey the weirdness... Daniel kept shouting interjections like "how many of you have a free operating system in your computers". When gnat finally asked to him to let us finish the photo shoot, Daniel kept fuming and finally stormed out of the podium, in the process almost strangling himself to and tripping over the wires, saying something about cancelling his talk. He returned after a minute, though, shouting the thing about antialiasing after us as we had finished the shoot and were dispersing.
Personally, I deal with cultists of GNU the same way as any bible thumpers coming to my door. I smile, nod, and slam the door shut. One can preach, but as soon as they start shoving their holy scripture down my throat I bite.
But I can't find anything else on the O'Reilly site, like maybe when it's going to be available?Dan Sugalski... and is the author of the upcoming O'Reilly book, Programming Cocoa Applications in Perl.
Thanks for any info or pointers.
andrew at nisus.com
