QuoteOriginally posted by: TopologistWell... Mac OS / Mac OS X ... same thing... X just means 10th version. nope, it's very much not the same. OS X is a completely different and good OS, based on BSD Unix. Mac OS 9 is in Windows 3.11 league, with cooperative multithreading and other things of that nature

All I wanted to know is if quants get to choose their operating system or not. If not, all right. I am not trying to sell the idea that Mac OS or Unix is better that Windows or the opposite; I use all three and I think that they all have good and bad things. I actually reckon that most people don't like the Hello-I-am-a-Mac guy and prefer the And-I-am-a-PC guy.

it's not about being against MacOS or Apple-afficionados, it's this:

Quote--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Originally posted by: misiti3780what do they use cygwin for,g++?--------------------------------------------------------------------------------they use it for the shell. it's a perversion, imho. gcc is available on Wndows, see MinGWI guess im confused here. What good is the cygwin shell on windows. I understand it provides of POSIX interface thatyou can use in windows, but the filesystem is still the windows file system. Also, I cant imagine peope would want to use it for its development tools. A windows-based IDE (not talking about the compiler) is much easier to use the emacs/pico/vi in cygwin.

I don't think the term "high performance computing" is usually associated with gaming machines. Don't get me wrong, the past 15 years has had a trend towards COTS (commodity off-the-shelf) clusters, but even so there is still work done on both specialilized supercomputers and workstations. There has always been a niche market for cad/visualization workstations, since that stuff is always cutting edge and the needs are somewhat different from most games. It's the same with anything else really; the people who want the work done are willing to spend the cash for it, and if big money is on the line then they are going to get the biggest baddest system they can afford.I don't work in a bank, but it seems reasonable that there are quants with many different needs... I could certainly imagine that they have some unix variant somewhere (probably linux although could be something way older). Desktop guys who push excel are going to be using Windows because that's what their managers know. I doubt Mac is used significantly. On the other hand, I was working in a semiconductor fab where the IT guys switched all the cleanroom computers from Dell PCs running Windows to Mac Minis. They actually gave a list of reasons why they made the switch, but the bottom line was that they were bored and OS X looked cool. All the other reasons were bullshit to sell the idea to the guys who decide where money goes.

QuoteOriginally posted by: misiti3780I guess im confused here. What good is the cygwin shell on windows. I understand it provides of POSIX interface thatyou can use in windows, but the filesystem is still the windows file system. Also, I cant imagine peope would want to use it for its development tools. A windows-based IDE (not talking about the compiler) is much easier to use the emacs/pico/vi in cygwin.I read it a book called "human-machine interface" many years ago that GUI is easy to learn, but command line can be easy to use. if you know all the keystrokes and commands then CLI tends to be easier. besides if your servers are Unix, and u r coming from Unix world, then u dont have to learn Windows tools, simply keep using Unix tools in Cygwin. its shell is much more powerful than Windows command shell, there's a lot of things there.i'm not saying that vi is a good idea, but i understand those who use it.

QuoteOriginally posted by: kilimanjaroI don't think the term "high performance computing" is usually associated with gaming machines.The machines are different, but the number-crunching chips used are commodity chips. What drives development of these commodity chips is gaming. HPC isn't a big enough market to support the billions of dollars necessary to do custom chip development and fabrication. Lots of teenagers (whether aged 15 or 45) wanted the fastest machine to play DOOM is what drives the number crunching market, and scientists and quants are just riding their coattails.QuoteIt's the same with anything else really; the people who want the work done are willing to spend the cash for it, and if big money is on the line then they are going to get the biggest baddest system they can afford.And the really big money comes from tens of millions of people spending a few thousand dollars each. Now if you are a corporation, you can fund the millions necessary to build a custom number cruncher out of commodity chips and the people writing software for those chips, but you can't afford the billions necessary to having special defined chips.QuoteI could certainly imagine that they have some unix variant somewhere (probably linux although could be something way older).Linux is best for number crunching because it is cheap and it works. Solaris also tends to get used a lot because a lot of quant work involves hooking up to the database servers and this involves high reliability. Windows is used because that's what office applications run, there is a scary amount of code that uses Excel as a frontend, and Microsoft writes some really nice developer IDE's. Using windows doesn't bother the unix-geeks that much, because the unix-geeks use cygwin.

The reason Macs are not feasible in the finance world is because Excel on the mac is garbage. Anyone who owns an intel-based mac (I own a MBP myself) would know simply because it runs Office apps in emulation mode (slow, crashes often). Office 2007 for the mac (when its out) doesn't even support VBA.