technology: May 2006 archives


Apples vs. Oranges

[ rakaur on Mon May 08 at 11:19 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

I am so ungodly tired of the “Apple MacBook Pro is $x more than a Dell with the same specs!” argument. It’s just wrong, and here’s why.

This post on some kid’s blog made it to the front page of Digg somehow. Let’s ignore the fact that it’s just blog spam. I’m just using it as an example of the billions of idiots out there making this argument.

The guy claims that “A new MacBook Pro with identical features and specs to a Dell Inspiron E1505 costs $1395 more.”

First off, I’m going to go into why comparing an Apple laptop to a Dell laptop is stupid in the first place. I’ll go into the actual wrongness of it all later. That’s not as important as why it’s stupid to compare them.

When comparing these things, people often use analogies. The analogy I find most people using most of the time is the “comparing Apple to Dell is like comparing Toyota to Lexus” argument. I think this argument is stupid, but it holds some validity. I’m not going to use an analogy. It’s way more simple than that. You can’t compare Apple’s top-of-the-line laptop aimed at business users (MacBook Pro) to Dell’s low-end bargain-bin crap aimed at average home users. Of course, you can counter with “it doesn’t mater what the market is if the specs are identical,” but they aren’t (Dell sells cheap components, that’s why they’re cheap). Just for fun, I went to Dell and built a custom XPS system (which is more in line with high-end hardware) which is “identical” to the 17” MBP. The MBP comes out to $2,699 and the XPS comes out to $3,344. The simple fact is the basis for comparison is wrong.

Unfortunately, people are stupid, and so they compare them anyway. Fortunately, people are stupid and never get it right. The guy compared the following specs, and deemed them “identical”:

Ok, but, you know, that’s not everything. He fails to mention, off the top of my head:

And that’s off the top of my head, there’s probably more. The guy also has three years of AppleCare in the price of the MBP (which is like $350) because “Apple only provides three months for free,” which is not true. The warranty on all Apple hardware is one year, with three months of free phone support. Apple’s phone support is likely much better than Dell’s, which is outsourced to India (though to be honest I’ve never called either). Saying “the MBP is two thirds the thickness!” is misleading, because that two thirds amounts to only half an inch. The half a pound less is somewhat important, though. People don’t figure eight ounces makes a difference, but when you’re carrying it around along with books all day, it makes a difference. The Dell has none of the Apple extras, such as iSight and fiber optic keyboard backlighting, etc. The LCDs are often compared, but from what I understand Dell makes quite good LCDs, and are probably comparable to Apple’s Cinema Displays. I’m willing to wager the screen brightness on the MBP trumps the Dell’s, though. Both the available video cards on the Dell use shared memory, which means it’s absolutely worthless as a video card anyhow (note that the X1600 on MBPs are shipped underclocked, though). The case is a big one also. I’d much rather have heavy-duty aluminum (read: metal) over a shoddy plastic case that’s far more likely to break and/or crack. Then again, instead of breaking or cracking the aluminum would probably dent. I don’t know which one’s more unseemly.

And then there’s the software factor, which is a whole other can of worms. I happen to prefer Apple’s software (and I’ve just recently started using it, so I am by no means a fanboy) over Windows and Windows software any day. Getting OS X and iLife over Windows XP and whatever crapware Dell preinstalls is worth a few hundred to me.

Also, the prices are way inflated because he adds a ton of crap such as AppleCare, which is a not insignificant price addition. My MBP was $1,799 (before tax, shipping, after student discount, default configuration) and it’s $1,999 for the upped CPU, and probably another $100 for the RAM, which is still no where near his $2,897 quote.

Stop comparing this shit. It’s not even apples vs. oranges. It’s like apples vs. rocks. I’m not a fanboy. I just hate stupid people.

-- rakaur // 2006.05.08 @ 11:19 PM

Movable Type

[ rakaur on Sat May 06 at 10:58 PM // category: software, technology, web ]

Movable Type seems pretty sweet. The only reason I’ve never tried it before is because I don’t do Perl, and I wasn’t about to taint my personal server with it. Since my new host has it anyway, I figure I might as well give it a shot. It’s so hardcore better than WordPress could ever dream of being. I think I’m going to try to work this into my site as it is now. That way, I can keep my design and I won’t have to rewrite the biggest thing (the blog), and the little subsections are five minutes each. Shouldn’t be all that hard.

Now, what WOULD be hard, is figuring out how to get everything out of my old blog and into Movable Type’s DB. I can’t live without my past posts, but I have no clue on Perl or Movable Type. Kind of sucks.

Anyone?

-- rakaur // 2006.05.06 @ 10:58 PM

Web Tools

[ rakaur on Sat May 06 at 11:51 AM // category: life, music, technology, web ]

So, the new Tool CD is pretty sucky. I was hoping it’d be an evolution of Lateralus, because while I like Tool’s older stuff I like the latter (Aenima, Lateralus) stuff better. I’d have to say Aenima was my favorite album. Unfortunately, 10,000 days sounds like an in-between of Undertow and Aenima. So, rather than going forward from Lateralus, it’s as if the went to Undertow, took two steps forward to Aenima, and a step back with 10,000 days. It’s far more slam-bang than thought-out melodies. I mean, the songs are still really fucking long but it’s not interesting and they’re not exploring some weird melody like they do in Lateralus, so there’s no reason for them to be eleven minutes when it’s the same two guitar chords over and over. It’s probably because they don’t care anymore and just wanted an income boost so they quickly threw an album together. I was pretty disappointed. This only makes me sad because the last APC album really sucked too. The only song I can tolerate on it is Passive. Maybe I’m just not in a Tooly mood recently, I dunno.

So, there’s the issue of my website, and what I should do with it. I have new hosting, but my current site won’t work there because of mod_python. I have a few options, but I’m not sure what to do. I need people to post comments if anyone reads this still and vote here on what I should do. I could:

I’d absolutely love to do the last one, but I just don’t have the time, interest, or patience. Rails seems really neat, but I don’t know it, and I don’t have the desire to learn it. WordPress and Movable Type are both pretty blah though.

Any ideas?

-- rakaur // 2006.05.06 @ 11:51 AM

MICROSOFT SUX LOL

[ rakaur on Tue May 02 at 10:24 PM // category: microsoft, technology ]

I hate Windows. My only purpose for having Windows at all is games. That’s it.

So I’ve read about this “Windows Genuine Advantage” shit that pops up every three nanoseconds to tell you your copy of XP is illegal or something. Today I witnessed it install on my perfectly legal copy of XP Pro (I didn’t buy it personally, but the CD I have is genuine) and promptly proceed to tell me my copy was illegal. So I open Firefox to go find some way around it, and Firefox apparently updated itself at some point and now won’t open. Wonderful. It just sits there “Firefox could not be updated. Close Firefox and try again.” and by clicking “ok” I apparently mean “relaunch Firefox so it will do this over and over.” So I reboot, thinking that’ll let it update, but no. So, I try to uninstall Firefox, but no. The file is in use. I boot to safe mode and remove Firefox.exe. I boot to Windows and wander over to Windows Update in IE for it to tell me my copy of XP is illegal. So I go find some patch for WGA on torrentspy and IE suddenly lets me use Windows Update, which wants me to install WGA! So I do that, and now I get these annoying ass popups every ten seconds. So what do I do? I find a key in the registry that starts “WgaTray.exe” and disable it and restart. Suddenly my copy is genuine. Microsoft really is up on this whole “pirating” thing. So I then use IE to go get Firefox once again.

So, let’s see, I had to:

It takes my machine like 20 seconds to boot Windows. The “Windows XP” logo screen flashes and disappears. However, after using Unix and OS X which almost never requires restarts, it just pisses me off.

All I want to do is play games. I didn’t pay for XP, and I didn’t pay for the games, but even if I did that wouldn’t change the fact that it’s still a flaming piece of shit.

Fuck.

-- rakaur // 2006.05.02 @ 10:24 PM

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