> > First off, I must say I am very flattered by your interest in my > opinion. > > That being said, I am sure that Stanford (CCRMA) has something like it > as > > well as Eastman, University of Virginia, and perhaps even Columbia. Also > > many other institutions that do electroacoustic music do some open- > source > > stuff albeit many of them do OS X exclusively. Apple enjoys strong > patronage > > from the academic community even though it poses as an oxymoronic > solution > > to those who seek true "freedom of expression" through use of their > > computers. In part, this is the case (IMHO) because OS X offers > superficial > > ease of use coupled with eye-candy which is usually good enough for most > > people. Not optimal, but good enough. > > OS X is not *that* bad. Hi, I don't think that OS X is bad as much as I don't think WinXP is bad. Both are good OS's but suffer from some deficiencies as well as lack longevity (think: transition from OS 9 to OS X left many users frustrated and to this day Apple community is rather fragmented because of it). > Like you, I much prefer the free-speech aspects of GNU/Linux. But, we > should never underestimate the competition. I don't consider a half-proprietary OS a competition to something that is completely free. Those two don't belong to the same category. Yet, FWIW if we consider the current market, according to the latest estimates Linux user-base rather comfortably surpasses Apple's not even including the users who install Linux on their Win and Apple boxes by themselves (which probably constitutes a relatively sizable percentage in itself). Please note that this number does not include silly statistics such as the number of Linux servers etc. Here I am strictly talking about desktop users. > Apple has a strong following among professional musicians, because > there are many excellent audio applications which install and work on > it with few problems. The realtime performance is quite impressive > right out of the box, without the days or weeks of tuning we do to get > comparable response with Linux. Most musicians don't want to spend > their time "fiddling with computers". This cannot be it because when OS X just came out there was absolutely no audio software that ran OK (i.e. at that point Max/MSP required Classic and did not support MIDI rendering it practically useless). Still, many continued to purchase Apple computers for the audio studios for imho 3 reasons: NeXT nostalgia (NeXT always held a special place in the academia), unquestionable devotion to Apple platform, and most importantly due to fact that this was what was taught in school (students would simply invest in a platform that was being taught in classes). I met several students who came from the UCSD (which is another school I forgot to mention regarding teaching GNU/Linux) and unsurprisingly most of them were using open-source audio software and Linux because that is what was being taught at the school (and because it was in their opinion superior software to the proprietary offering -- I obviously share that opinion as well :-). In addition, to this day both WinXP and Linux have greater offering of software and much of it is likely comparable in quality. Finally, the vanilla real-time performance is not that impressive on Apple. It's ok, but not impressive. Most of the studies that reported the impressive latency on Apple machines involved just as much tweaking as it would on a Linux or Windows box. Hence, I believe the (1) fact that many studios already have Mac's (so the implication is that they are already used to its platform, while changing to a different OS and/or introducing new machines with different architecture would require time to adapt and would potentially introduce maintenance headaches, none of which is desirable by the faculty overwhelmed with their other responsibilities), (2) and the fact that the audio users are mostly unaware of Linux's abilities are the two key factors that impede presence of Linux in audio-oriented academia and which continue to drive Apple's dominance in this niche market. Furthermore, as a result no student is exposed to Linux and therefore whoever comes out of such environment will be likely a Mac-only user who, if they decide to pursue an academic position, will likely prolong this vicious circle by continuing to maintain an Apple-only studio. Best wishes, Ico --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.788 / Virus Database: 533 - Release Date: 11/1/2004
