OSX Fanboys -- Uprising AGAIN!
Every now and again there seems to be a small uprising in the geek Mac using community. Paul Graham seems to be man behind this iteration of the uprising but he’s getting a lot of support from a number of smart people like David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails) who has a couple of choice quotes, this one is my favourite:
I would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals. If you don’t care enough about your tools to get the best, your burden of proof just got a lot heavier.
Firstly some anecdotal evidence, this seems to be a mostly developer point of view; find me some professional systems guys who buy into this. Secondly I have a personal requirement that doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere with OSX: Virtual machines. Until they get VMWare, UML or something better than Virtual PC running on those shiny laptops they’ll never be of any real use to me. I’m a huge VMWare fan, it lets me test my scripts and deployments on multiple operating systems while only forcing me to carry about a single Dell Lat. All I need now is an X86 port of HPUX and I’m set.
As an after thought this years FOSDEM was the first one where the number of Macs in the audience decreased to be replaced with Dells and IBM Thinkpads. Why? Who knows, maybe it’s because chunks of the system are still closed source and proprietary? If I’m going to use a closed system I might as well use the one all my users have…