I am posting this using my new wireless router, a spanking new, hospital white Airport base station. I finally caved to the pressure to be able to bridge AppleTalk over wireless, so that the aspiring authors in my house can print right from their nearest computers.
Setting it up was easy (so was setting up my old LinkSys router), though I couldn't get the encryption to work from Windows XP, so I'm living on the edge and not encrypting my wireless transmissions.
One surprise was that Windows dropped AppleTalk support as of XP, so I can't print the way I'd like, but instead continue using the infrared port. There is a third-party solution that provides AppleTalk on XP, but it's around $200.
Another, even more expensive solution, is to invest in a new Powerbook. I'm completely in love with mine, and since the underpinnings are Unix, I can do all of my programming stuff really easily.
But yeah... Probably not the best solution, in reality.
Posted by: Nathan at October 14, 2003 10:33 PM
I'm thinking about it. Mostly the PC is for doing 101 stuff where the students all have PCs it seems.
Posted by: rkc at October 15, 2003 7:05 PM
Silly students. When will they learn? I can write Java on this bad boy much easier than I ever could on Windows. Oh well...
Posted by: Nathan at October 16, 2003 12:49 AM
I've got a 17" Powerbook at work. I would make sure you try a Mac out before you buy one. The major + is definitely have unix with full driver support (i.e. all hardware such as the dvd burner works out of the box, unlike Linux). The major - is performance. The machine is sluggish, and there really aren't any good IDE's for it outside of vim/emacs... If they put a G5 processor in it it would be a slam dunk!
Posted by: mjuster at October 17, 2003 1:08 AM
I actually haven't ever found mine to be sluggish at all. I upped the memory to 640 MB, and I never notice any performance problems. And XCode is coming out in the next version of the OS, and it looks really good.
Posted by: Nathan at October 18, 2003 2:15 AM