On a Mac
========

SDon't worry.  I only have  turned on my  Apple PowerBook G4  (a machine
which was made  when that company was named the  "Apple Computers") and
I'm now writing  (and reading the gopherspace) on it.  I think I didn't
booted it for 6or so months!

Some things  regressed - the  Evernote no  longer syncs (their  fault -
when  my current  subscription  will  end I  will  no  longer use thier
services nor  apps). I think  that some www  pages are less  usable now
than they used  to be. But this  is not a machine for  WWW browsing, of
course...

The rest  seems to work. In  my opinion these old  PowerBooks are nicer
machines than  the modern *Books  which are thin  for the cost  of user
experience (keyboards...).

After  days and  weeks  of using  the MNT  Reform  this thing  feels...
different. The keyboard is not that good as the Reform one is but it is
way better  than anything modern I  have access to. The  screen is huge
but  I miss  the trackball  (I must  confess that  I use  the Microsoft
optical mouse  here - you  know, Microsoft  always made good  mices and
this one is not an exception).

I have the OS 10.5 on the PowerBook  (it was called the Mac OS X then).
After using the spartan interface of the  Sway on Linux the OS X GUI is
more visually pleasant (but less effective to use).

I was  a bit curious  about speed of  those two machines  (the Reform's
default CPU  is considered slow by  almost everyone) so there  are some
times for a finite element analysis on a very simple 3D problem (I used
a single thread code to make it more comparable):

PowerBook G4 (1.67 model): 2:30 minutes
MNT Reform (MX8 CPU): 2.18 minutes

So,  in theory,  20  years old  PowerPC (which  wasn't  a cutting  edge
technology when  it was made!)  is not worse than  8 (or so)  years old
industrial  ARM CPU.  In practice,  there are  other things  which make
things more complicated...