Computer-related items

Current music: BassDrive

A few more or less related news items and personal notes about today's and tomorrow's computers....

Well, that didn't take long: hackers got the development version of OSX86 running on standard PCs. Personally, I don't see much to get excited about. I (erroneously) expected Mac sales to crater in response to the announcement that Apple is moving to Intel CPUs over the next two years; it hasn't happened yet. My guess that the Intel-based Macs will use a 64-bit CPU and the OS won't run on the current (32-bit) Pentiums. Given I'm 0-1 on this topic so far, though, take that with a grain of salt. If the plan is to use Pentiums for the newer Macs, I doubt that Apple will put that much effort into locking it down — they'll do enough to make it non-trivial, and those people who buy OSX86 and install it on their white boxes will be on their own, support-wise. The way I see it, if Apple sells ten times more OSX86 boxes than their current Mac sales figures, they'll break even on sales and win big on margins.

On my own iBook, I've switched back to Apple's Safari browser. It's tons faster than what I was using (Camino) and it's built-in RSS aggregator works very well. If you were using Safari to read Tales from FAR Manor, you would see a little “RSS” button in the address bar. Click on that, and you'd get the RSS feed for my blog. You can bookmark the RSS feed and it will count the number of unread posts you have in that directory. It's really nice. Dashboard and Automator are everything they're cracked up to be as well. I'm using an older version of OSX (10.2.8) at work, and I already miss having these functions.

Speaking of iBooks, you had to have heard about the stampede in Richmond VA. Wazoo! I think I'd have eBay'ed the whole shebang myself; they could have easily raised $300,000 that way. But you can't expect intelligent thought from a school system that dumps computers that work and replace them with Smelly Dells. Unfortunately, when you use low-bidder purchasing, you get what you pay for.

I sure hope that school district isn't running W2K on their new computers. The Zotob worm hosed up bigger and much better-funded entities than a school district. Another report said ABC News had to use typewriters to get the news out. Wow... I'm surprised they even had any typewriters available, let alone enough to go around.

I'm being a good boy and not blogging from work. More tomorrow, if time allows. The Evil Twins are visiting, but fortunately they're already in bed. I should be in my bed as well. 'Night!