Re: External hard drives

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from flash  on Sun, 09 Aug
2009 17:19:56 +0200


> Quark Express, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and PageMaker
> were all written for Mac

For the operating system that Apple abandoned.

> and only later adapted for Windows,
> in which environment they run markedly less efficiently.

Isn't it true that apps always run better on the platform they
are native to? (Always!) Try porting any app, big or small, to
another language, or another OS... it becomes pretty obvious.
The bigger the app, the more likely you are to port rather than
rewrite for the native APIs -- and the more likely it will be
s-l-o-o-o-w. A whole lot of thunking (remapping) going on.

> Osirix

Don't you need 6Gb of RAM to run that? XyWrite runs in a 64Kb
frame!

> For another example, my wife works in the radiology
> department of the university clinic of Bern and uses certain
> professional image processing programs (such as Osirix) which you'll
> probably never see in your life though your life may depend on one
> if you ever need a CT brain scan. They run only on the Mac, not on
> Windows.

Any recommendations for a home CAT scanner? Not too big!

> Nuf said.

About what? Should we be using Solaris because the military
adapted it to launch missiles? And our lives may depend on it?
Adobe has actually done a decent job in recent versions of
Photoshop, gradually rewriting the code for the Windows API --
there's an Adobe white paper describing their thinking, which is
to move gradually to platform-independent coding. The programs
you mention (Illustrator etc.) were originally written before
there were powerful cross-platform options; there are plenty of
developments nowadays that are identical in their Mac and
Windows versions, e.g. OED v4 (Flash, reportedly written in haXe
for the NekoVM virtual machine). I perceive no difference in
function, speed, etc, on roughly equivalent machines.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
-----------------------------