My brother makes a decent living doing this in the Northern UK. He's in the yellow pages rather than online, since most of his customers call him because their computer is messed up and they can't get online.
I believe he sells video card, memory, processor upgrades, but the bread and butter is fixing messed up PCs.
Also, if you have two networks with the same name, e.g. 'Netgear', then OS X can get confused. I've only had this happen a few times, but it's really annoying. The simple solution is to make sure you name your routers appropriately.
My RAZR interferes with my logitech creature II speakers that I plug my iPod into when at home. Loud enough that I have absolutely no doubt that it could seriously interfere with navigation instruments in an aircraft.
My 4 year old Nokia phone never did this. I think the RAZR is garbage. Motorola need to hire some UI engineers. It'll be a Nokia for me again next time.
My new LaCie 250 Gig drive uses Firewire and gets a steady 32 Mbytes/sec when backing up from my Powerbook 12".
I've never seen anything like this throughput from USB 2.0 on PC or Mac. Firewire is really important on this Mac, since USB 2.0 has some bug that really limits the speed, and is kind of known for sucking, though it's fine for keyboards and mice and the like.
Just as some anecdotal evidence, OpenGL runs pretty decent on the Intel Extreme Graphics on my girlfriend's Dell, and relatively like crap on my Compaq Presario Desktop with VIA Unichrome Graphics. This result is just eyeballing whether the OpenGL screensavers run smoothly, from a default Ubuntu LiveCD.
They are smooth on the DELL, and crap on the Presario. And these are reasonably comparable $600-class machines. I'd say the 945 graphics should be just fine.
My real simple understanding is that most calls to the kernel on Mac OS involve a trap and context switch to a special kernel thread. This sounds like the way communications works across differents processes in COM, which isn't the highest performing technology known to man.
Mac OS may suck (performance-wise) compared with Linux and NT, but the difference isn't noticeable on end-user machines. Even on a server, it's probably decent in real life. I have no OS X server experience so can't say much.
Reminds me of university, where I once saw a fellow student copy a listing out by hand, then actually sit down and type it all in again to one of these old DEC lineprinters (probably old in 1984)!! Just to get a listing.:-)
Man that Amstrad was a POS. I remember fighting one to get Lotus-1-2-3 running to write a database for the radiopharmacy in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in about 1991. They replaced it with an Elonex and things worked a lot better.
Yeah, I remember the joy of finally managing to get an Orchid Soundwave 32 to work correctly in my Dell 486DX2. Man that card had a lot of interrupts. Funnily enough, people that enjoyed that stuff are probably running Linux now, whilst people that hated it are problem running Macs.
I'm sure that Dimension is in a landfill by now. Can't remember if I ever rebuilt it, but I suspect not. I started building my own machines after that, but always seemed to end up with some piece of crap like VLBus graphics cards when everyone else had something better.
The Dell was pretty decent. I programmed a couple of databases on it when Access 1.0 came out, and wrote a number recognition program that got published in PCPlus, neatly predating* grafitti which did the same thing, but for the entire alphabet. Damn me for not trying to patent that.
* I think I probably got the idea from the Newton, but cut it down to recognising just the numbers one character at a time. It worked pretty good, and was written in VB. If anyone has an old PCPlus disc with the source, you will be mightily rewarded for sending me a copy.
Yeah, my father, on coming home with my Acorn Atom (assembled by a bloke at work, and the keyboard was never really right) promptly selected the longest listing in the manual and in a fit of enthusiasm that has never been repeated, typed it all in.
He then sat there for at least an hour waiting for it do something, turning it off and losing all that work moments before I returned from a Scout meeting with glad tidings of the 'RUN' or 'R.' command.
You just reminded me of my favorite Red Dwarf line: "Diddled by a giant squid on a first date ? Think how you'd feel in the morning!"
Oh man, that brings back some memories of disconnecting the speccy in order to watch TV, after playing through Lunar Jetman, which had crashed on the puppies screen. Damn, I'd forgotten that shit.
Yea! I had an Atom as my first machine too! Way back in 1981, around the 'Royal Wedding'
I remember doing the ?#B002 = 0 or something to wait for the screen blank before drawing anything, or else you got terrible noise all over the screen. (Like the new iMac hahahaha - joke i have a PBook)
I remember reading and reading the Atomic Theory and Practice book. It was pretty awesome, though the best fun was typing in games from magazines like C&VG, which initially at least carried the ocasional Atom game. Atom BASIC did mainly look like line noise due to being abbreviated (optionally) but not tokenized.
Eventually I made it as far as writing my own crappy games, like goalie, where you had to take penalties against a goal keeper. Simple but fun. By the time I got a speccy, my games were a bit better. And now with Java, even more fun. (Java is as good as BASIC for simple games - game source is on that page)
David Johnson Davies did a pretty cool little green book with a simple compiler in it that ran on the Atom and BBC. That is still fairly impressive to run in 4k. There were some cool curve drawing programs and undergrad style stuff too.
In due course, I got a spectrum 48k, and a BBC B, then an Amiga 1000, Archimedes (worked for Computer Concepts for a year), Dell 486 and a longish line of Pentiums from work. Typing this on a Powerbook awaiting my Mac Book which will take me back to Intel.
Lots of people bemoan the loss of something from computing, but I don't think that's the case. There's plenty of ways to do way way more than we could ever do before, and it's still easy to do the easy stuff, just download a BASIC interpreter, or use Java, or JavaScript. Plus the web makes it easy to find out how to do things. Saving many hours using the local bookhop as a library, like I used to.
As a plug for current technology, specifically OS X, my current out of hours project does real-time FFTs on audio data with real time tweakable settings and decent graphics. The XCode tools on the Mac are super slick and integrate help, loads of great frameworks including altivec-based FFTs, fast graphics, great debugging with a visual version of gdb, the list goes on. Every programmer should pick up an iBook. Think of it as $1000 dev tool, with a laptop thrown in. Start playing with Cocoa, and feel the fun.
I use the iTunes controller in dashboard all the time since it doesn't mean switching windows. This overlay of useful stuff is great, and I don't notice any of the lag that other people seem to complain of. I suspect the OS X probably needs a gig to work best.
If I remember correctly, the main issue and differences are that Quartz 2D has to render from off-GPU card backing store, and Quartz 2d Extreme keeps everything in the GPU. However, the current graphics solutions in Mac hardware just don't have enough RAM available to hold all the required buffers, so Quartz 2d Extreme is not enabled by default.
The really important thing is that in both cases a compositor builds the final screen buffer. This is why popup messages like animated buddy sign-ins don't screw up and smear everywhere like they do in Windows XP, where a compositor is not used.
Bearing in mind that Centrino machines can often kick the ass of Pentium-4's, at vastly less power usage, I'm assuming my MacBook Pro is going to be pretty damn good.
Mac OS X should really fly on these machines, especially considering that the G4 is more of a Pentium III level chip and hasn't increased much in the way of performance for a while, and OS X performance on the G4 is pretty decent.
Oi, I use it in my personal dev chain at work, and I've pushed this out to , errr, another 5 people or so.
I'd be more worried about the fact that ActiveState will be used and dumped by the venture capitalists. For those with short memories, look at what happened to ArsDigita, the company started by Philip Greenspun.
In a sentence: take successful/profitable open source company and run into the ground by imposing expensive dinner consuming and buzzword spewing venture capitalists. Stand well back.
I shoot a D70 and get almost 200 photos on a 1 Gig card. I carried my Mac with me to Paris on a recent vacation and photographed about 100-130 pics a day, using the new Adobe Lightroom to screen down to the best 10 or 20. On my website if anyone wants to look.
At St Andrews University Comp. Sci. department in the late 80's, all our SUN machines were named after distilleries. I can remember grant, islay, taliska. That was pretty cool. I wonder if they are still there.
You may be doing something funny, since my 12" AlBook is showing 4:14 right now, and it's usually fairly accurate. e.g. 2 hours at night, then another 2 hours on the plane, and it's ready for a charge. That's with light use, and min bright screen but airport running.
It's totally awesome compared with past PCs I've owned.
Slashdot Mirror
My brother makes a decent living doing this in the Northern UK. He's in the yellow pages rather than online, since most of his customers call him because their computer is messed up and they can't get online.
I believe he sells video card, memory, processor upgrades, but the bread and butter is fixing messed up PCs.
Give him a break, it's Slashdot Rant (beta).
My father googles for google.
Also, if you have two networks with the same name, e.g. 'Netgear', then OS X can get confused. I've only had this happen a few times, but it's really annoying. The simple solution is to make sure you name your routers appropriately.
My RAZR interferes with my logitech creature II speakers that I plug my iPod into when at home. Loud enough that I have absolutely no doubt that it could seriously interfere with navigation instruments in an aircraft.
My 4 year old Nokia phone never did this. I think the RAZR is garbage. Motorola need to hire some UI engineers. It'll be a Nokia for me again next time.
I'm in Gooberspace now !!!
My new LaCie 250 Gig drive uses Firewire and gets a steady 32 Mbytes/sec when backing up from my Powerbook 12".
I've never seen anything like this throughput from USB 2.0 on PC or Mac. Firewire is really important on this Mac, since USB 2.0 has some bug that really limits the speed, and is kind of known for sucking, though it's fine for keyboards and mice and the like.
Just as some anecdotal evidence, OpenGL runs pretty decent on the Intel Extreme Graphics on my girlfriend's Dell, and relatively like crap on my Compaq Presario Desktop with VIA Unichrome Graphics. This result is just eyeballing whether the OpenGL screensavers run smoothly, from a default Ubuntu LiveCD.
They are smooth on the DELL, and crap on the Presario. And these are reasonably comparable $600-class machines. I'd say the 945 graphics should be just fine.
My real simple understanding is that most calls to the kernel on Mac OS involve a trap and context switch to a special kernel thread. This sounds like the way communications works across differents processes in COM, which isn't the highest performing technology known to man.
Mac OS may suck (performance-wise) compared with Linux and NT, but the difference isn't noticeable on end-user machines. Even on a server, it's probably decent in real life. I have no OS X server experience so can't say much.
Reminds me of university, where I once saw a fellow student copy a listing out by hand, then actually sit down and type it all in again to one of these old DEC lineprinters (probably old in 1984)!! Just to get a listing. :-)
Man that Amstrad was a POS. I remember fighting one to get Lotus-1-2-3 running to write a database for the radiopharmacy in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in about 1991. They replaced it with an Elonex and things worked a lot better.
Yeah, I remember the joy of finally managing to get an Orchid Soundwave 32 to work correctly in my Dell 486DX2. Man that card had a lot of interrupts. Funnily enough, people that enjoyed that stuff are probably running Linux now, whilst people that hated it are problem running Macs.
I'm sure that Dimension is in a landfill by now. Can't remember if I ever rebuilt it, but I suspect not. I started building my own machines after that, but always seemed to end up with some piece of crap like VLBus graphics cards when everyone else had something better.
The Dell was pretty decent. I programmed a couple of databases on it when Access 1.0 came out, and wrote a number recognition program that got published in PCPlus, neatly predating* grafitti which did the same thing, but for the entire alphabet. Damn me for not trying to patent that.
* I think I probably got the idea from the Newton, but cut it down to recognising just the numbers one character at a time. It worked pretty good, and was written in VB. If anyone has an old PCPlus disc with the source, you will be mightily rewarded for sending me a copy.
Yeah, my father, on coming home with my Acorn Atom (assembled by a bloke at work, and the keyboard was never really right) promptly selected the longest listing in the manual and in a fit of enthusiasm that has never been repeated, typed it all in.
He then sat there for at least an hour waiting for it do something, turning it off and losing all that work moments before I returned from a Scout meeting with glad tidings of the 'RUN' or 'R.' command.
You just reminded me of my favorite Red Dwarf line:
"Diddled by a giant squid on a first date ? Think how you'd feel in the morning!"
Oh man, that brings back some memories of disconnecting the speccy in order to watch TV, after playing through Lunar Jetman, which had crashed on the puppies screen. Damn, I'd forgotten that shit.
Best Slashdot Thread EVER.
Yea! I had an Atom as my first machine too! Way back in 1981, around the 'Royal Wedding'
I remember doing the ?#B002 = 0 or something to wait for the screen blank before drawing anything, or else you got terrible noise all over the screen. (Like the new iMac hahahaha - joke i have a PBook)
I remember reading and reading the Atomic Theory and Practice book. It was pretty awesome, though the best fun was typing in games from magazines like C&VG, which initially at least carried the ocasional Atom game. Atom BASIC did mainly look like line noise due to being abbreviated (optionally) but not tokenized.
Eventually I made it as far as writing my own crappy games, like goalie, where you had to take penalties against a goal keeper. Simple but fun. By the time I got a speccy, my games were a bit better. And now with Java, even more fun. (Java is as good as BASIC for simple games - game source is on that page)
David Johnson Davies did a pretty cool little green book with a simple compiler in it that ran on the Atom and BBC. That is still fairly impressive to run in 4k. There were some cool curve drawing programs and undergrad style stuff too.
In due course, I got a spectrum 48k, and a BBC B, then an Amiga 1000, Archimedes (worked for Computer Concepts for a year), Dell 486 and a longish line of Pentiums from work. Typing this on a Powerbook awaiting my Mac Book which will take me back to Intel.
Lots of people bemoan the loss of something from computing, but I don't think that's the case. There's plenty of ways to do way way more than we could ever do before, and it's still easy to do the easy stuff, just download a BASIC interpreter, or use Java, or JavaScript. Plus the web makes it easy to find out how to do things. Saving many hours using the local bookhop as a library, like I used to.
As a plug for current technology, specifically OS X, my current out of hours project does real-time FFTs on audio data with real time tweakable settings and decent graphics. The XCode tools on the Mac are super slick and integrate help, loads of great frameworks including altivec-based FFTs, fast graphics, great debugging with a visual version of gdb, the list goes on. Every programmer should pick up an iBook. Think of it as $1000 dev tool, with a laptop thrown in. Start playing with Cocoa, and feel the fun.
Pick the olive scheme. Make everything a bit smaller. Use decent modern fonts. Presto, Windows XP looks pretty good.
I stuck with the old W2k scheme until I started using a mac, then was inspired to try and make the XP new style interface look decent.
I use the iTunes controller in dashboard all the time since it doesn't mean switching windows. This overlay of useful stuff is great, and I don't notice any of the lag that other people seem to complain of. I suspect the OS X probably needs a gig to work best.
If I remember correctly, the main issue and differences are that Quartz 2D has to render from off-GPU card backing store, and Quartz 2d Extreme keeps everything in the GPU. However, the current graphics solutions in Mac hardware just don't have enough RAM available to hold all the required buffers, so Quartz 2d Extreme is not enabled by default.
The really important thing is that in both cases a compositor builds the final screen buffer. This is why popup messages like animated buddy sign-ins don't screw up and smear everywhere like they do in Windows XP, where a compositor is not used.
Bearing in mind that Centrino machines can often kick the ass of Pentium-4's, at vastly less power usage, I'm assuming my MacBook Pro is going to be pretty damn good.
Mac OS X should really fly on these machines, especially considering that the G4 is more of a Pentium III level chip and hasn't increased much in the way of performance for a while, and OS X performance on the G4 is pretty decent.
Oi, I use it in my personal dev chain at work, and I've pushed this out to , errr, another 5 people or so.
I'd be more worried about the fact that ActiveState will be used and dumped by the venture capitalists. For those with short memories, look at what happened to ArsDigita, the company started by Philip Greenspun.
In a sentence: take successful/profitable open source company and run into the ground by imposing expensive dinner consuming and buzzword spewing venture capitalists. Stand well back.
I shoot a D70 and get almost 200 photos on a 1 Gig card. I carried my Mac with me to Paris on a recent vacation and photographed about 100-130 pics a day, using the new Adobe Lightroom to screen down to the best 10 or 20. On my website if anyone wants to look.
At St Andrews University Comp. Sci. department in the late 80's, all our SUN machines were named after distilleries. I can remember grant, islay, taliska. That was pretty cool. I wonder if they are still there.
You may be doing something funny, since my 12" AlBook is showing 4:14 right now, and it's usually fairly accurate. e.g. 2 hours at night, then another 2 hours on the plane, and it's ready for a charge. That's with light use, and min bright screen but airport running.
It's totally awesome compared with past PCs I've owned.
I for one, welcome our elderly female overloads.
I dropped into terminal and had to use 'sudo vi /etc/hosts', then it worked.
What the hell is this, Debian?!?? ;-)