Recently in apple Category


Yep, Windows Still Sucks

[ rakaur on Sun Aug 03 at 09:51 AM // category: apple, microsoft, software, technology ]

Just in case you were wondering. Let me share a tale with you.

A week or so ago my laptop’s hard drive died. I am currently poor, so that means my laptop is out of commission. This also means the only computer I have available to me is running Windows XP. And I am sad.

Since I was stuck with using Windows, I was left without my beloved Apple Mail. Since Dreamhost’s server-side mail filters catch next to nothing, I was relying on Mail’s client-side filter, which itself isn’t that great. Without even that, though, it was impossible to wade through my inbox. I’ll not shame Outlook’s spam filter with a mention.

So, I decided to move my mail from Dreamhost to “Google Apps.” I figured I’d move it over, use gmail’s web interface until I got my laptop back up, then enable IMAP within gmail and use Mail as normal, with the added benefit of Google’s spam filter, which is excellent. This in itself was not difficult.

The difficultly lies in the fact that I have around 10,000 emails, and I wanted to keep them. Not as easy.

Click here to read this entire entry.

-- rakaur // 2008.08.03 @ 09:51 AM

Steve Jobs Allegedly Insults Customer

[ rakaur on Sat Mar 29 at 09:48 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

I found this story on digg, and it seems a little fishy. Customer spills water on a brand new laptop. While supposedly accepting full responsibility for the incident he for some reason “emails Steve Jobs” who supposedly somewhat insultingly replies.

The customer, an owner of a recently water-damaged MacBook Pro, called Apple customer care to get information about repair costs. Accepting full responsibility for the water damage, the customer was still subjected to confusing and contradictory information about the repair. Frustrated with his experience, he took matters into his own hands, emailing sjobs@apple.com (a widely acknowledged direct line to high-level Apple customer care).

-- rakaur // 2008.03.29 @ 09:48 PM

Inside the Apple IIc

[ rakaur on Thu Mar 27 at 11:21 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

PCWorld has an interesting look back at the “MacBook Air of 1984.” It’s on a million separate pages. They have no shame.

At 7.5 pounds, the Apple IIc portable computer was the MacBook Air of 1984. Ever wonder what makes up a vintage classic? We took one apart to find out.

-- rakaur // 2008.03.27 @ 11:21 PM

Dvorak Still a Jackass

[ rakaur on Wed Mar 26 at 12:14 PM // category: apple, technology ]

John C. Dvorak once again continues his time-tested tradition of making lots of money by making totally irrelevant points on random technology-related topics. He probably got angry because he lost his iPhone.

Stay tuned next week for his ten ad-ridden-page piece on how iPods cause 99% of traffic accidents because they make you dizzy from using the click wheel.

He’s like the Ann Coulter of the technology world.

-- rakaur // 2008.03.26 @ 12:14 PM

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

On Moving Data, Losing Data, a Short Essay on Why Finder Sucks, Deleting Data, and Gaming, Mostly as an Excuse to Use This Ridiculously Long Title

[ rakaur on Wed Apr 26 at 02:27 AM // category: apple, games, software, technology, unix ]

And so it is done. Mostly.

I gave Gentoo a big “fuck you, Gentoo Linux, you suck.” I now have Windows XP on daedalus, and it is now my gaming machine. And I am happy. This was not easy, though.

You see, being my main machine until now, daedalus had the biggest hard drive I had laying around, which is 200GiB, to store all my stuff like video and music. This was on a 160GiB partition under ReiserFS. This was bad. I had to transfer everything off my 200GiB hard drive onto various places on my network (including my mom’s computer proteus, my server cyndane, my laptop praxis, and my iPod ePod). Along the way, my entire collection of Red vs Blue and The Elegant Universe Nova series seems to have up and disappeared. I transferred it back to daedalus under Windows, it was there, and now it’s just gone like it never existed. And I am sad. I think it’s because Finder crashed a few times while relocating stuff.

And—let me digress for a moment—that’s another thing. Why does the Finder suck so bad? So far my experience has gone something like this:

So why does the Finder suck such a multitude of cocks? It sucks just as bad as Explorer, and in just about the same ways. It randomly crashes and disappears and relaunches ten seconds later. It randomly refuses to do things because “the file is in use” until you log out and back in (restarting it is not enough). It randomly refuses to do things over the network that it was doing yesterday just fine. Even if I turn on the “Prevent .DS_Store creation over network” option it STILL shits .DS_Store files in every single directory you view, and as a result my entire media partition on daedalus is infested with these. I’d expect this if I was using 10.0, but this is 10.4.6. Yeah that’s great add stupid and spectacularly useless shit like Dashboard, but completely ignore how much Finder blows.

Anyway, as I was saying.

One of the good things about having to relocate 100+ GiB of data is that it kind of sets your priorities on what you need and what you’ll never ever look at ever again ever. I wound up deleting more than half the stuff I was going to save.

So now, daedalus has XP on it, and I am playing games, and I am happy. My original plan was to install X on cyndane, and I might yet, but not until the need arises. Until then, I’ll be playing some games.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.26 @ 02:27 AM

Not So Dreamy, Apparently

[ rakaur on Sat Apr 22 at 12:01 AM // category: apple, software, technology, unix ]

Well, that sucked.

DreamHost uses NFS mounts for their mailing system. Because NFS is widely known for being so mind-blowingly slow that it’s nearly useless for anything other than people that get two emails a century it made moving my mail extremely hard.

This was a colossal pain in the ass. At least I can now remove mail from cyndane, which will remove about 80% of the running load and installed packages.

One down, two to go.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.22 @ 12:01 AM

Dreamy Mail

[ rakaur on Thu Apr 20 at 01:45 PM // category: apple, software, technology, unix ]

So, I’m trying to move my nice and new pretty mail system over to my new host, DreamHost. This makes me think two things:

I’ve been scping my mailbox for over an hour now, and I don’t believe it’s even close to being done. My main goal in all of this is, of course, to get all my stuff off cyndane, and thus off my residential cable. What I’d ultimately like to do, is get all this off cyndane (www, mail, XMPP, etc.) and put X on it so that I can put Windows on daedalus, and be able to KVM between Windows and Unix. As a bonus, I’ll still have my laptop, which doubles as desktop/Unix.

This would make me happy.

I’m almost certainly going to keep FreeBSD 6 on cyndane, though I’ve thought about Linux (only because it’s more desktop-y). I definitely wouldn’t use Gentoo, because I’ve certainly learned that Gentoo’s only purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. I’d probably go with Debian if anything. However, almost certainly going to stay with FreeBSD 6.

Sounds like a plan.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.20 @ 01:45 PM

I Did Something!

[ rakaur on Wed Apr 19 at 06:46 PM // category: apple, software, technology ]

So, I wiped my laptop and reinstalled, just for fun. I have about 10GB more than I did before. I have no idea what was eating it up. Reinstalling also fixed the “wtf Apple” logo on startup. I still have lots of crap to reinstall, though. I forgot some of my settings, as well.

Next step is to backup daedalus and put Windows on it. That’ll suck.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.19 @ 06:46 PM

On Mac, Windows, and Storage

[ rakaur on Thu Apr 13 at 01:29 AM // category: apple, hardware, microsoft, software, technology ]

(If you haven’t noticed, I’ve given up on witty titles late at night).

I dunno what’s up with my laptop. Well, nothing, really, it works fine. It seems that after installing WinXP with Boot Camp it’s been a little flakey. When I boot it from power-off (which is rare, and I’ll mention that later) I get a question mark, then the Apple logo. It also takes longer for some reason.

I think the culprit is that when Boot Camp partitions it seems to be into a logical partition instead of primary (which is dumb, ‘cause I mean, they know it’s only two partitions anyhow). When you have Boot Camp revert back to one volume, I don’t think this undoes the logical-ness. Then again, it should only be the second partition, so I dunno. Google isn’t my friend in this case.

Also, when I was forced to reinstall the other day, I noticed it installs a lot of shit I don’t need. Like, a lot of shit. Like, a bajillion languages that no one even speaks anymore. I think there’s a Latin.lproj file somewhere. I found some program that removes everything but American English from all installed programs, but I think the files for the stuff on OS X is still there. It’s a big deal because this shit is huge. It’s not gzipped or anything. I don’t know the format of the .lproj files, but it sucks. I freed up over five gigs of space by zapping these from my applications. How sad is that?

I’m thinking about reinstalling from scratch (backing up /Users/ and /Applications/ somewhere else, of course) and customizing my install. Also, I’ve installed and removed just about every piece of software for OS X out there, so I have a mind-blowingly huge amount of little application turds laying around in /Library/ and shit. I’m a filesystem clean freak, so I’d like to get rid of all that stuff.

“Plan to throw one away; you will, anyway” is usually a good policy. One of the few things ESR has uttered that I happen to agree with.

This doesn’t really fit here, but I said I’ll mention it so I will. Evidently, my MBP uses two watts of power while powered off, and two watts of power while in sleep. It has a 60 watt-hour battery. I’m not sure on the math here, how long can it go powered off or asleep at that rate? System Profiler says the full charge is 5846mAh. So, right, my point was I almost never turn it off, I just close the lid and it goes to sleep. If it draws the same amount of power, then who cares?

I’m also thinking I’m giving a great big “fuck you” to Gentoo and killing it and installing WinXP on my desktop, mostly for games. I’m really fucking sick of having to edit ten files just to do anything in Portage. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about all my shit though. I’d hate to squander a 200 gig drive on Windows. I store all my stuff on it, and I’d like to keep it on something other than NTFS. Maybe I should swap it with my backup drive in cyndane or something. I’m not sure on this. I don’t want my stuff on some MS filesystem, that’s for sure. Hopefully soon enough most of it will be gone though, since burning DVDs from AVIs actually works on my laptop (as opposed to Nero Vision) I plan to just burn all my video to disc, and delete the AVIs. Just about 60% of my stuff on that drive is video. The rest is mostly music, and that’s on iTunes anyway.

Good luck finding time to do this stuff though.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.13 @ 01:29 AM

Main Index | Archives | hardware »