Re: IDL i/o on G4

[JD Smith <jdsmith(at)astro.cornell.edu>]

I presume you saw:

http://www.rsinc.com/AppProfile/idl_Motorola.cfm

If I were you, I'd drop RSI a line and ask two things:

1.  What are your plans with respect to MacOSX?

2.  If you have internal builds of IDL for MOSX, can you comment on I/O
performance?  Altivec usage?  Command line support?

I should think a G4 titanium with OSX would be just about the fastest
laptop for running IDL available, but only if RSI is on the ball and has
a version ready when it hits prime time (sometime this summer, though
the release is next week).

You might also consider bothering RSI about LinuxPPC support, which
should be pretty trivial for them.  Then your I/O issues largely
dissappear. 

Keep in mind however that all laptops' I/O will underperform: disk size
and weight are optimized over speed.  

Good luck,

JD