Friday Dust Mite Blogging™
Dust Mite gazes skeptically at the remains of my Macbook, which suffered the True Death tonight when I gave it an overly enthusiastic twist in an attempt to quiet the whining of the hideous backlight.
Well, shit, that’s not particularly useful.
I suppose I can always repurpose the carcass as a server (I can still telnet into the box, so I didn’t manage to kill the cpu or disk) but I am now without a desktop machine except for this horrid windows box I’m typing at right now. But for desktop purposes, I could replace the carcass with…
- A Macbook Pro
- pro
- lcd backlight, so (hopefully) no hideous backlight whining.
- bigger hard drive.
- con
- US$1839
- Leopard (the clown car of macosx)
- A Macbook Air
- pro
- lcd backlight.
- sexier than computerly possible.
- con
- US$1691
- Leopard
- An iMac.
- pro
- cheaper than a macbook air or a macbook pro
- sturdier than a macbook
- slightly bigger screen
- con
- Ugly ugly ugly
- not a notebook, so it probably does not do suspend but will just sit there sucking up power unless I remember to shut it off.
- doesn’t have an LCD backlight, so may develop the hideous whine.
- Leopard.
- NOT PORTABLE.
- An external monitor for the existing Macbook
- pro
- fairly cheap
- don’t have to migrate things off the macbook
- con
- With an external monitor and keyboard, all of the lovely power-saving features of the macbook go right out the window.
- See my previous commentary about the hideous whine.
- fairly ugly.
- Oh, and it would bite the wax tadpole in the portability department.
- Scrap the macbook (I guess I could drop a vanilla Darwin onto the box and just use the open source components of MacOS) and install the OS on this Toshiba Tecra.
- pro
- All I need to buy is a DVD burner and some DVD blanks
- con
- No guarantees that it would work
- a lot of the hardware in the Toshiba may not work correctly.
- the Toshiba doesn’t have the same fit and feel as a macbook (a con that’s made up by the hideous whine and the mouse button not sticking, so it probably doesn’t count.)
- Give up on MacOS and go back to Microsoft Windows.
- pro
- I hear that they are very very nice in the local insane asylum.
- con
- I’m sure that Microsoft Windows is a lovely operating system, but it’s not Unix and it would drive me insane.
- Use Linux! And Gnome! Or KDE!
- No. Just no. If I wanted to use a clown-car GUI, I’d use Windows and theme the fuck out of it.
UPDATE: Oh, to devil with it, I bought a new Mac. I’ll sell the pile of laptops, windows software, and unused K-mount lenses I’ve got lying around here to pay for it.
Comments
The problem with X11, which I used to think was just a matter of applying enough eyes to it, is that all of the user interfaces built on top of it are a matter of a dozen or so different individual UIs piled roughly together.
If, for example, I’m using blackbox as the window manager and I try to cut and paste between putty and Firefox, I have to highlight to select on putty, then right-click to insert into firefox. If I want to cut out of firefox, I have to use ^C to copy into the clipboard, then right-click to paste into putty. And then the horrid clipboard is stuck on the firefox selection until I can force empty it, at which point highlight to select starts working again.
KDE and Gn*m* are better integrated on the cut and paste front, but they’re still pretty feeble on the rest of the UI integration front. (The less said about Xterm settings the better; I use putty instead of Xterm because it actually lets me do configuration.)
And, god, KDE and Gn*m* are s*l*o*w; My desktop machine at work (a 1.8ghz P4) rapidly becomes a pool of slugs when KDE meets my workload. And this with a gbyte of core (Ozymandius [the new name for the now-a-server'ed macbook] worked happily with 512kbytes, not even breaking enough of a sweat to spin the fans; the P4+KDE ran up to 60% cpu when I did anything out of the ordinary.)
So, no, I’m done with X11 for now. I’m willing to pay the turtlenecked great Satan $199 for MacOS, because it’s FreeBSD underneath and thus much like (most of the) the rest of the systems I work with.
Which unused K mount lenses might those be?
My (new) 50mm FA f1.4 lens (niiice lens, but I haven’t used it since I got my 50mm K f1.2 lens) and the 18-55mm DA kit lens I got with the *istDS in the first place. I might dump the Quantaray 70-300 tele-macro too; I bought an ancient promaster 100-500 and if it does macro photography at all well I won’t need the Quantaray.
The only really good lens of that lot is the FA 1.4 lens. The DA is okay, but slow and the optics are muted, and I have to use the quantaray in manual mode because the *istDS doesn’t have the grandest autofocus in the jungle.
Sorry to have taken so long to go back and check for an answer; work is doing some moral approximation of throwing rabid badgers at my head.
I regret to say that I’ve got all of those, or equivalents.
Comments are closed
There are a few other GUIs for Linux. Some are definitely not a clown car. They are small, sparse, and fast. What about them?