I’m such a geek…
This isn’t a long drawn out post….. just a quick mention of something that happened to me recently in quote form…
I can’t believe it…. So, the first time I really get into actually sitting down and writing my english paper, and it is the middle of the fucking night when all I want is sleep!
I can’t figure out how my mind works sometimes. I’m off to bed now.
When I first heard of Facebook, I thought it was a good concept. That was before it went public and became really popular. Everywhere I go, I see people on a computer checking Facebook. It WAS a great site, but lately I’ve become more and more pissed off by it. It used to be that it was nice, simple, and elegant. No clutter and no way to modify it to put shitty themes on it. That was when it was great. However, at some point they added applications, which could have been a good idea, but of course it is there to abuse. Now, I have to constantly fend off all the stupid applications that people invite me to use. I hate doing that. Ever day, I need to ignore at least 2 new applications, usually having something to do with vampires, or free condoms, or super super super advanced walls. These things alone clutter up the Facebook pages. I hate wanted to just go write on someones wall, but having to scroll all the way through 50 applications to find their wall. I hate all the stupid twinkly things and having all the “Vampire bite me!” and “Pirates win!” and “Here are my top friends, you aren’t cool if you aren’t on my list.”
Please, let the madness stop! What happened to the simple networking concept of it?! Why is it that every time such a site gets popular, it gets abused to shit? Is it because the general population just likes their web sites nice and shitty?
This will be my first hardware review!
As many of you know, I opted for the one, the only Apple MacBook Pro 15.4″ Matte 2.4Ghz. Some people that know me were surprised, and obviously questioned why. I’ll tell you why. I love it. I’m not going to lie, I just plain love it. Since I first saw it in 2006, I have wanted it so bad. In fact, for the last several years, since Apple started making more professional looking machines (bright colors and bubbly designs are OK for kids, not for professionals), I have loved the designs. But then, seeing them take the latest G4 laptop and making it even thinner and sexier, and significantly more powerful with an Intel chip, I have wanted nothing more.
Let me first start with the cost. I got a student discount of a whopping $200, but even then, that only covered the tax plus a little more. So, it ended up being nearly $2500, still. That is a lot of money, I understand, but I can tell you right now, it was worth it. Many of my friends opted for the dells, but they ended up having to go with the 17″ versions to match the chip in my 15.4 laptop. Going to the 17″, from what I’ve seen, makes it simply to big to carry around. One of those 17″ dell will not even fit in my backpack laptop compartment. I did not want a 17″ laptop, but I didn’t want any smaller than a 15.4″.
Now, lets review all its sexy lines. This thing is 1 inch thin. In that 1 inch, it fits a powerful 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM (which I will be upgrading to 4GB soon), an 8600GT 256MB, 160GB HD, 8X DVD Burner, and a whole lot more! This machine packs so much power into such a small, sexy package that you can’t help but to drool when you see it. It never slows down for me. I love the fact that is holds more power than my big desktop (currently). It maintains pretty good battery life; nearly 4 hours, depending on what I’m doing. The hardware amazes me every time.
One feature that is something that I know for a fact that Windows never pulls off consistently, if at all, is when I close the lid, the machine goes to sleep, and it stays asleep. I have never seen a windows computer do that every single time, and resume without issues, or stay off, for that matter. There is nothing that can stop my MacBook Pro from sleeping and staying asleep with everything I’m working on intact.
Now, the OS. I’m not going to say that Mac OS X is flawless, that is a common misconception. No OS is flawless, I don’t care what you say. I’ll tell you right now, Tiger has serious networking issues, but remember, Windows does, too. Connecting to networks is no problem, it just simply isn’t very friendly with windows systems, and when you go to a different network, such as school, it seems to get very confused about those shares (kind of yells “Where the fuck did it go!? What do I do?!”). But, overall, the OS is amazing. Why do I love it? Because it is fluent to me. It is unix based, and I can’t even explain to the average computer user how much I love having access to a unix terminal at any time. Also, the OS does hold more of a “It Just Works” type of rational than Windows does. When I plug in a flash drive, it just pops up in Finder. There is no stupid “Found New Hardware, Please wait while we figure this mess out.” It Just Works. Same thing with a mouse, camera, scanner, whatever.
Also, the OS does just have a certain theory about it that just says it was built for efficiency. The keyboard shortcuts are much better laid out in OS X than in Windows. I truly feel like I can get more done on it in less time. In addition, the GUI is designed in such a way that a novice user can use it easily, but also an advanced user, like myself, can customize it a lot.
So, you are a person that thinks I spent too much for this sexy machine. Well, I did do some shopping around. First of all, to even get this amount of power in a dell, you need to go to the small to medium sized business website, because their consumer line does not even over up to the 2.4Ghz chip. Then, to build a comparable machine, it will cost approximately the same, even today. And, it will still not be as sexy, it will still have a glossy screen (glossy screens are terrible), and it will also lack the wonderful Mac OS X.
But I can’t game much on here? Not true, again. Boot Camp, as you probably know, allows me to install Vista or XP on here, making it possible to be just as game friendly as any Windows laptop. Then, Apple is starting to collect game manufactures who are willing to write games for Mac OS X as well as windows. So, I really think Apples could be a future gaming competitor, which can actually be more easily achieved because Apple controls all their hardware, so incompatibilities will be very limited.
I am at this point patiently awaiting Mac OS X Leopard. I will most likely review that after I’ve been using it for some time.
So, in the end… MacBook Pro – Love it. Recommend it. 10/10, 5/5, whatever scale you want to use. Don’t need so much power, or don’t have so much money to spend? I’d probably recommend something else. Just ask, and I’d be glad to make recommendations!
If there is one thing I’ve noticed in the last several years, having matured, held a job followed by an internship, and now starting college, is that sometimes you need to step back and decide what is practical… Where are efficiencies lost? Are those inefficiencies affecting enough to be a problem? Or, do you even care if those inefficiencies are causing a problem?
I have an example of a recent thought that has been receiving some thought lately. You are reading this very blog because it is hosted on a server. This server happens to be in my room (at least at the time of this writing), sitting there, mostly idle, but serving some purpose when it’s needed, by either me or someone viewing a page hosted on it. A server is not something that can be turned off, and just powered on when needed, it always needs to be ready to serve its purpose on call. So, I set up this server, and it’s been running fairly well for over 2 weeks now. I took the easy route and just installed Ubuntu server 7.04. It seems to work pretty well, I’ve got no major complaints, mostly just difficulties in how things are configured because I’m so used to configuring stuff in Gentoo. Because of this, I would absolutely love to actually run Gentoo on the machine. However, this is where I remember why I don’t want to run Gentoo on the machine.
I don’t want to run Gentoo on the server because it is an old server. It is only a Pentium III 550Mhz machine with a whopping 384MB of SD RAM. Not high performance by any modern standard. I’ve had experience running Gentoo on machines, believe it or not, as slow as 166Mhz, and I can easily say that it is not fun for long. The initial setup isn’t so bad; if I were to compile the system from the ground up, it could probably take about a day. It could be done in a few hours if I take the easier method of installing it. But then, maintaining the installation is where the problem comes, especially if I don’t get around to it often enough.
So, the struggle is deciding if it worth the time to setup the server to run Gentoo, and would it be necessary. I still don’t have an answer for this, but that is OK, I have plenty of time to come up with an answer.
Another example I have it actually college. Yes, of course college is worth it. True, people have become very successful without a college education (Bill Gates, for example), but on average, for the average person, college definitely helps a lot. However, not all elements of college are practical. For example, my chemistry class right now. In high school I took a chemistry class and I got the basics down for the most part. I believe that is about all I need to know for my major. But I am in an honors class that is being taught as if I was going to be a chemist or a something that would require a lot of chemistry. But, after this chemistry class, I am not going to need to take chemistry 2 or anything, so, why am I in such a rigorous course? Just because. That’s it. General Education requirements say I need to take it. That is not practical because it consumes a large amount of my time without any real purpose. Not to mention I have to pay for it. Also, at this point I need to truly buckle down in my chemistry class, because it is not going well at all. I am now just hoping for a passing grade in the class.
But the question keeps coming up on whether or not I really belong in college. Is it practical for me to spend all this time, or could I come up with a really good idea and find a way to profit off it? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
I have a class where were I attend a lecture 3 times a week for an hour, no big deal. I read the chapter, I pay attention in the lecture, I take notes, and I’ll study a bit for a test before we take it… But this class has an added bonus thrown on top of that. This bonus is called WebAssign.
My Chemistry class uses this for on-line quizzes. These aren’t your average quiz. These are quizzes sent from a very bad place. Based off a few Google searches, this site is causing extreme stress everywhere it lingers. I mostly find myself just trying to get an answer it accepts, no matter how I get to it, I don’t care. It is just so frustrating to spend about 20 minutes on a problem because you know it has to be exactly right, then it returns the evil statement, “Your answer differs from the correct answer by orders of magnitude.” To which I usually scream some curse words and walk away feeling defeated.
It is not so much that it is a pain in the ass to get it all completed. It’s not even that it takes hours to complete. It is not even that there is no way to hack the source and get the algorithms used to get the right answer (it’s all server side, so that makes it pretty difficult, yes I’ve investigated the possibilities 
). It is more so the fact that if you use up all your chances to get the right answer that it will not tell me the right answer or how to get to it! In other words, I learn nothing by completing the stupid assignment! It is just a huge waste of my time, and I’m not alone in these frustrations.
Teacher/Professors only like it because it makes grading very easy… they do nothing!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Recent Comments