[Rcpp-devel] Eigen vs Arma -- was: Re: Ceres nonlinear least squares solver

[Tim Triche, Jr.]

Why Mac OS X?

1) it's shiny
2) it's Unix
3) everything's a PDF

Two of my most competent coworkers absolutely love their Macs.  They also
ask me the most "interesting" tech support questions, ones where I feel
like I can't say "the problem is that you are using Windows" but at the
same time, I get vaguely annoyed that Mac OS X tends to be more trouble
than say Linux to set up MySQL client libraries, or compile Boost, or
whatever.  I can't get *angry* at them, but as a user of *nix for two
decades (i.e., a beginner), I want to say "you know, things don't have to
be a pain like Solaris or FreeBSD anymore!".

But then I wouldn't be able to dump interesting programming projects onto
them, so I just fix whatever it is that's causing the problem.  Look on the
bright side, at least they're not using Windows.  I personally prefer Linux
over *BSD, but that may be cause I started with Irix.

Oh, and my wife has a MacBook Air, too.  Which is 1000x easier to
troubleshoot than her old Windows laptop.  I do not complain.



On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 10:05 PM, Michael Hannon <jm_hannon at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Steve Lianoglou <mailinglist.honeypot at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
> >[snip]
> >> At the end of day, and to me as a non-user of OS X, this just seems to
> make
> >> working on OS X as tedious as working on Windows where you have to patch
> >> your
> >> system together in bits and bobs.  I guess I am spoiled rotten by 15+
> years
> >> of dpkg and apt-get and "things just working". Nicer for development in
> my
> >> book.
> >
> >Can't argue w/ the fact that this makes developing on OSX a bit of a
> >PITA ... it's just that working w/ the rest of OSX is so nice ;-)
>
> This may alleviate some of the PITA:
>
>     http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
>
> (I haven't used it.)
>
> I *am* curious to know what is so nice about Mac OS X.  This isn't a
> troll.  I
> can see that Macs are useful if you have to deal with, say, Adobe products,
> etc.  But I've never been able to fathom their appeal for work in math,
> statistics, science, etc.  (My wife has multiple Macs, and she loves the
> things, even for her statistics research, but I don't seem to "get it".)
>
> -- Mike
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-- 
*A model is a lie that helps you see the truth.*
*
*
Howard Skipper<http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/31/9/1173.full.pdf>
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