Category: Appley

Pegasus revisited….

3 months of MAC Book Pro bliss and I have to say I’m not regretting my purchase one bit. Dual booting with Win XP and the MAC OS is nothing short of the best of both worlds. Granted I think my total time in Windows is something like 6 hours while not playing “Supreme Commander” other then that it is all Mac all the time. I would even go so far as to call the Mac my primary computer.

However to every “Ying” there is a “Yang” and the “Yang” in this case is my desktop. All 75 pounds of it. I’ve been mulling over the next iteration of “Yang” for a while and I know it won’t be a iMac… I love my Mac Book but honestly I do use my desktop primarily for one thing.

Gaming.

While I can game on the Mac Book under Windows I do like that I have a desktop with a full size keyboard. And after a couple of hours you really begin to apperciate that full size keyboard.

And the fact that I have come home to a computer that says “failed cpu test” on boot twice in the last month tells me it’s time to start really thinking about a new rig.

I have the case picked out… it’s my usual ungodly huge case.

I’m having pain and consternation with other pieces parts and I now am formally soliciting input. Please note that this input will be throughly hashed through and then hashed through again with another party (you know who you are) before landing on a final configuration.

Here are some talking points…

– Dual Core 6750 vs Quad Core 6600…. the dual core has a faster front side bus and is more over-clockable then the quad core. The quad core is a quad core. Price diffrence is ~$75

– SLI…. It seems like a good idea if you actually do it. The kicker is when you strap together two mid range cards you still don’t equal the current high end. And for the over all cost of the two mid range cards you can get a kick ass high end card. Also which platform Nvidia 650 or 680?

– Hybrid drives will be out soon if they aren’t already. I’m not one to pick up on new technology very often but this one does seem like a winner.

Other considerations, the new chips from Intel and AMD will be out in the next couple of months. Is there enough reason to wait for those chips or utilize what is out there currently? (Personal thought, most of the new chips will be of the quad core and 1300mhz fsb variety and may very well warrant sitting tight).

I’m defiantly in hurry to build this rig as I’m happy with the MAC Book and my Wii (and since Metroid 3 comes out next week I know that is going to keep me busy).

Go Go iShit!

Ok the iPhone has been out for a week now and every technology pundit with a computer and internet connection has given their $.02.

Time for me to give my $1.25 about their $.02.

There is no way to make a technology pundit happy… they always find some flaw with the item in question that will then be repeated by every half twit out there (I would have used more colorful language but this particular half twit has used technology pundititry in more then one or five cases…) So the biggest complaint about the iPhone has been the lack of inclusion of 3g data for it’s data service (HSDPA for the GSM folks or EVDO Rev 0 or Rev A for the CDMA folks). The official line from Apple is something to the effect of…

“Current 3G chips suck power and we have included WiFi to use instead of 3G data” And they are absolutely correct. I will take a shitty WiFi connection over a good EVDO connection any day of the week.

Now for the counter point to the iPhone when Palm released the Treoo 700P it included EVDO data for CDMA (The Treo 750 on GSM has HSDPA) and what did the technology pundits roundly criticize?

“But it doesn’t have WiFi”

Mary MOTHER OF FUCKING…….

And now I remember why I stopped watching TV news… because at least with technology pundits I know they are idiots… With political talking heads they could be feeding me a steaming pile of shit and I wouldn’t know the difference… though that probably has more to do with the fact that I tend to skim over the politics sections of CNN and the BBC.

So where does this leave us? Well the iPhone is a interesting piece of technology that will be unlocked shortly (I give it 3 weeks from this posting and 6 weeks after that before it’s so easy that my brother and mom could both do it) I’m still out in the cold since there will not be a CDMA version of the device unless Apple launches the iPhone in Japan and just happens to leave the door open for the device to work with CDMA carriers in the states.

Me? I’m going to pass on the iPhone in it’s current revision and wait for the iPod with touch screen and upgrade. Of course I need it to be at least 40 Gigs before it’s worth the money to me. I don’t feel this great need to condense my gadetry down to one device between my Treo and iPod I’m good and for those long hauls I always take my laptop with me.

So there you have it kids the iShit from the iTwit’s brain.

Chuck waits… You wait…

A week into the whole Mac transition and it’s been way more painless then I thought. I’ve had more consternation about what to do with my music and photo’s more then anything else. (two copies at the moment). It has not been all smooth sailing I have run into issues getting some web apps work. Don’t worry it’s all related to my work and that is why Steve Jobs gave us BootCamp.

Of course what Steve giveth Bill really fouls up….

I of course loaded boot camp and windows on to the Mac. And Windows runs great, I just have to boot into the Windows side to use it. I’m going to be honest I’ve never been big on booting between operating systems. So I’ve been checking out virtualization for OS X. The good news is there are some really excellent options out there. The bad news is that Microsoft has some really fucked up licensing.

This one has me a little ticked off so if you don’t want to read about Microsoft and Apple for the rest of this post I would just go some place else if I were you.

I decided to load XP, you know since it’s stable been out for forever and a day, and way cheaper then Vista. See now you can get two versions of XP full… OEM and Retail. The difference is OEM instantly gets tied to your hardware set. Meanwhile retail has some flexibility built in to help with those pesky hardware upgrades. Turns out that you can virtualize a retail version of XP but not a OEM copy unless you install the OEM copy directly into the VM. (This is really good info for anyone thinking about doing this).

So where does this leave me? Well for the time being I don’t know I haven’t landed on a virtualization setup that I really like. I would like to just do it and move on. At the same time though I still have my work laptop that I bring home and my desktop that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Honestly for me the best solution would be a VM type appliance that contained I.E. and access to Java in the VM. After that I could really care less about Windows.

So other then the whole I need I.E. to do some legacy web stuff for work that I can do on another computer just as easily I think I could recommend a Mac as your next computer.

Unless you Curtis or Clint… there is just no talking any sense into those two.

Reflections in F.U.D. and you

Being a I.T. guy from time to time I get asked by certain indviduals for help for things that fall outside of my normal day to day duties.

I like to call these individuals Doctors.

So I get a call today from a doctor who wants to use his shiny new MAC to work from home with… I feel his pain. I agree to help him.

So as I’m talking to him I ask if he has made a boot camp partion for his MAC. You know since running windows in a virtulized environment is the least painful way to get 99.9% of windows only apps (read as active X or require IE) to work in MAC.

“I don’t want to load windows on to the MAC and have to deal with anti-virus”

Wait, you don’t want to deal with Anti virus in Windows on your MAC?

Ok on one side I can see the point… I mean that is why you bought a MAC isn’t it? So you didn’t have to deal with all of those stupid Windows viruses… On the other hand…

What on earth are you bitching about? Antivirus programs are so dirt simple that they should be the first or second thing you load up on your computer! And you don’t want to deal with them?

My god man…

For the record I do have Anti virus on all of my boxes (Norton and AVG mainly) Windows/Linux/Mac

Just because Lord Steve says it’s secure doesn’t mean it’s true kids…