I am a computer musician. My day job is C++ Unix programming for the
financial industry. I have to tell you that the future for Unix looks fairly
bleak to me. It is gradually increasing in absolute numbers in the high-end
server market, but it is losing market share in everything else, including
scientific and technical workstations, low-end workstations, graphics
workstations, and application servers. This has been happening for about six
or seven years.

Currently, Windows workstations offer more price/performance at the low and
middle ends of the workstation market than do Unix workstations.

Windows will not last forever, but I am reasonably confident that it will
increasingly dominate computing through at least several more generations of
software engineering (say, the next five years).

What I do personally is develop all my own stuff in Java. In theory, I
should be able to get it to work on any platform. I haven't yet tested this
theory (but I soon will be!). Sign of the times: Java, developed by Sun on
Solaris which is a flavor of Unix, runs measurably better on Windows than it
does on Solaris or any other Unix.

I have worked a little bit on SGI Indys, and I certainly admire the
machinery, but I think it is a mistake at this point to develop music
software on what is rapidly becoming a niche platform.

-----Original Message-----
From: tolve 
To: madole@mills.edu ; csound@noether.ex.ac.uk

Date: Thursday, March 26, 1998 5:23 PM
Subject: Re: csound 3.47 for PPC?


>dave,
>
>thanks very much for your response, and all efforts on behalf of macusers!
>have been kind of depressed lately since April 98 Electronic Musician
>"scope out the whole scene" article on software synths gave exceedingly
>short shrift to the macintosh platform. my god not even a mention of max or
>msp!
>
>yeah i know the handwriting is on the wall, but still believe a
>disproportionatly high number of music professionals operate on the mac
>platform. now most of them may not be creating the blips and bleeps that i
>am so fond of, but they do tend to spend a good deal more cash on high end
>musical hardware and software.
>
>hoping rhapsody will give the platform the kick in the butt it needs, or at
>least that the mac holds out until i can upgrade to SGI. certainly you guys
>will continue to develop for that in the forseeable future -won't you?
>
>anyway, thanks again.
>
>tolve
>
>>> perf 3.47 beta 3, also at mills (incidentally, get info on this perf
>>> yields version number of 0.3.4b3).
>>
>>This is because the Mac Version resource allows only one digit per
>>place.  Sorry - using the vers resource seemed like a good idea at the
>>time.  The banner in the output window should read MIT 3.47.
>>
>>The perf 3.47 beta 3 on our ftp site is 3.47 as recently released by
>>jpff.  I am taking care of bugs but haven't really heard of many since
>>I announced that beta on this list, so there won't be much difference
>>between that and the non-beta release.  Matt recently took care of a
>>couple of front end bugs.  Soon as I have time check out a couple of
>>things I'll wrap up the new csound, perf and csref in a nice new bundle
>>and announce it AND the source code availability.  In the meantime
>>these things can be picked up separately from the ftp site at Mills.
>>
>>> all correct?
>>
>>Sounds good to me.
>>
>>Dave
>>
>>PS Re: recent thread - Matt, Mike and I were chomping at the bit to do
>>an extended csound port for the power mac, but it (slowly and
>>painfully) fell through.
>
>
>
>

Michael Gogins wrote:
> Currently, Windows workstations offer more price/performance at the low and
> middle ends of the workstation market than do Unix workstations.

I agree, if you're actually comparing commodity Intel boxes with
proprietary workstation hardware.  Mass-market is going to win, despite
all of the brain-dead baggage Intel carries.  I hope PPC survives, but
binary compatibility is a strong pressure.

Running both on Intel PCs, I'd say Unix and Windows have similar
performance.  (Windows apps tend to be more bloated because they get
upgraded more.)  Price is hard to measure, since Unix apps tend to be
either expensive or free.  But I think Windows will win here not on
performance/price but mostly for the usual positive-feedback reasons.

> What I do personally is develop all my own stuff in Java. In theory, I
> should be able to get it to work on any platform. I haven't yet tested this
> theory (but I soon will be!).

"Good luck... you'll need it."

-- 
     Eli Brandt  |  eli+@cs.cmu.edu  |  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/