“For our [Mars] landing site work, we always get the highest-end desktop Mac we can find, so we just got one of the G5s with dual 2-GB processors and 8 GB of RAM,” Matt Golombek, a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the E-Commerce Times.
Conventional wisdom paints the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) Macintosh as a “soft” machine. Elementary schools might use it, and those in creative fields might use it, but those who want to do hard-core computation choose workstations running Windows, Unix or Linux, right?