[ydl-gen] Slow ibook X11 (2D)

[Derick Centeno]

Hi Warren:

It's funny that the Nextstation was built around the PPC, which Jobs -
the same fellow who started Next walked away from when he came back to
Apple.
I'm sure that decision was based on a business reality which made sense
to Jobs at the time.  In any case, when it comes to scientific analysis
the market in my opinion has moved backwards for the sake of being
"penny wise and dollar foolish" and the rest of us are paying for it in
that we have to do more work to build software and acquire hardware
which meet modern processing and environmental friendly requirements. 
When power consumption or "green" considerations become a factor in the
purchase again, Power based systems will be "rediscovered" again.

Regarding software have you looked at Inkscape
(http://www.inkscape.org/)?  It's a vector based open source drawing editor.

Warren Nagourney wrote:
> Hi Stephen,
>
> Thanks for the link.  It was an interesting discussion and brought  
> back memories of my extremely idiosyncratic approach to computers over  
> my 40 years as an experimental physicist. Before retiring (2 years  
> ago), I used NeXTstations (<$100 from University surplus) for my DAQ  
> and they were faster and better in many ways than modern machines with  
> 100x more CPU power, memory size and disk size. The built-in DSP and  
> very well-written and efficient OS helped. My last grad student didn't  
> like it since it was a one-off and didn't help him learn about NI  
> products (which I hated).
>
> While I am sure I could find an open source data analysis tool suite  
> to replace Igor, the business of doing accurate and convenient  
> drafting is not as easy. All of the inexpensive drawing apps lack the  
> precise and extremely easy to use "snap" features of the Ashlar  
> products. I find that using other products are very tiring - getting  
> lines to connect with some precision and frequently tiny annoying gaps  
> are revealed when printing. Claris CAD copied the Ashlar approach  
> (badly, in my opinion) and dropped the product when Ashlar brought out  
> the lawyers. Many drawing products have similar features, but none are  
> very convenient, in my experience.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Warren Nagourney
>
> On Jan 31, 2009, at 7:01 PM, Stephen Harker wrote:
>
>   
>> Hi Derick and Warren,
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 05:29:55PM -0800, Warren Nagourney wrote:
>>     
>>> Thanks, Derick. I will look into R.
>>>       
>> I have been very satisfied with R for many purposes.  On the question
>> of other, useful, packages there was a recent article in
>> http://slashdot.org/ on a similar issue.  This was titled: Open Source
>> Software For Experimental Physics? and is given at this url.
>>
>> http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/30/1443203
>>
>> You may be aware of the thread resulting from this article and/or the
>> programs that were recommended by different people.  If not, it could
>> be worth looking into to see if there is something useful to you
>> listed.  I would expect that several would run under OSX as well as
>> Linux.
>>
>> -- 
>> Stephen Harker                           s.harker at adfa.edu.au
>> PEMS
>> UNSW at ADFA
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>>     
>
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>   

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