[BUGS] hardware changing time .. moving forward

Mon Jan 28 19:41:15 EST 2008

On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 03:27:10PM +1100, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> Hi Jonathan,
> 
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:25:00 +1100
> jonathan michaels <jlm at caamora.com.au> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 07:33:50PM +0000, Andrew wrote:
> > > 
> > > On 26 Jan 2008, at 03:21, jonathan michaels wrote:
> > > 
> > > > past getting a toshiba but lately i have been thinking about
> > > > getting an apple notebook, esp if there is one available with a
> > > > 17 inch screen with 1990x1600 ish resolution. not teh intel
> > > > garbage redressed to look like an apple but a real apple
> > > > buitleded box .. any thoughts would be appreciated, please.
> > > 
> > > All current macs have intel CPUs in them and seem to work fine. The  
> > > only 17" laptop though is the MacBook Pro - http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ 
> > 
> > o'well i suppose at some point apple would have to go backwards
> > in terms of cpu choice .. i'm a cpu bigot and prefer the
> > mc68xxx seris as being a far far better architecure than
> > anything intel can dream up or 'borrow' so to speak.
> 
> Naah, the 68k (post '020, anyway) had some fundamental errors
> (just like the VAX) (admittedly, they seemed like good ideas at
> the time) that made progressing to out-of-order super-scalar
> issue close to impossible.  For all it's warts, the ia32 didn't
> have those same problems, and so can go faster.  The extensions
> that AMD did to take it to 64 bits are all entirely sane, and
> the result doesn't suck much at all, IMO.  ISA matters almost
> not at all, these days.  Code in C, Java or (better) some
> variety of lisp, scheme or ML and be happy.
> 
> > > Personally, I have a MacBook, run OSX and am quite happy (well with my  
> > > choice of laptop at any rate ;-).
> > 
> > i've been speaking to some mac owners (ok apple bigots) when i
> > filter teh BIAS it makes for a really compelling case (for my
> > needs). i really don't understand why this kind of bitternes,
> > this kind of pointless emnity exists between apple/intel
> > bsd/linux/microsoft. it makes getting information from teh
> > relevant camps (really) difficult at times, really confusing.
> 
> Hey: you were the one coming out with the anti-intel rhetoric
> just now...

not anti intel rather boosting mc68b09e  and the early 68000
that wehn compared to waht intel had at teh time were left fro
dead .. my 'anti intel' is not like the anti microsoft that i
see not so much here but in other places it is most virulent. i
have alwasy been a supporter of the right tool for the right
job .. be it microsoft, intel, linux bsd, qnx or even os9 and
even apple et al .. unlike some that i have seen where if they
have a hammer then every thing is a nail so to speak. perhaps
that did not come out as well as i had hoped, apologies ...

> My two cents (or so):

thank you much appreciated

> I really love my 12" G4 PowerBook, but it's getting a bit slow
> by today's standards.  Wish Apple had made one follow-on with
> the PWRficient dual-core PPC-64 chip before switching to
> Intel...
> 
> I particularly love MacOS-X on it: it's easily the best Unix
> workstation environment that I've used, and I've been using them
> exclusively since Sun in '86 or so.
> 
> I also really love my AMD64-X2 FreeBSD-7-STABLE workstation,

this is one question i had wanted to ask .. how does the amd
cpu stack up, esp now that it has some of teh former axp inards
(i think thats what happened to some of teh former dec axp
inard technology) i have been following the -stable list and
have seen to many 'this is broke' by people who should know
that they are doing so there would be little hope for me as far
as i can see.

> although it has been sufficiently painful to set up as a desktop
> that I hesitate to recommend it to anyone else just yet.  GNOME
> spazzed out on me recently, until I figured that there were a
> bunch of new daemons that I had to turn on in /etc/rc.conf.

i'm struggling with gnome at teh moment i didn't like the look
off kde but for me kde is turning out to be teh most reliable
part of my gnome 'desktop' it works even stand alone .. er i
mean the kde bits so i'm getting the idea that a pure kde
desktop would probably be a far better bet, except for teh
resources required .. matrox mill II 8mb on a pent pro 200 mhx
and a clunker ibm netvista with a p4 1g4 hz cpu and a whopping
256 mb dram freebsd 6.2 struggles far more on teh netvista than
it does with the p6 box, me thinks the matrox is the key here...  

> Also *had* to set LANG to en_AU.UTF-8 or else the epiphany web
> browser would just crash.  Also can't get the nv driver to work,
> and the vesa driver will only push my display to its native
> 1600x1200 when the wind is blowing the right way.  For all that,

i have a pair of matrox g550's (sadly agp versions) with 16 or 32
mb vdram ??? if i can find one of my clunkers to give one or
more a new home.

as far as cpu/basic hardware i don't really need that much i
think most of my need sit with image manipulation and with a
decent video card it should be all that i need apart frpm truck
loads of good aolfasioned scsi realestate .. i don't like much
of what i am seeing in -stable about the sata/ide/acpti
whatever its called these days, i have been using scsi since
aha-1542-b and its never let me down .. where as 'ide' ok i
have a litany, i cannot afford cheap hardware, bbeen there done
that, as tehy say. 

> it's my mental home, and it seems as though things are coming
> together for it really beautifully (if a bit slowly).  I don't
> know that I'd trust FreeBSD to run a laptop properly for me yet,
> though: too much weird hardware in them.

this is why i'm looking at mac os on a native apple hardware ..
they should have done teh work to make it work togather 

> It's good, I think, to have waited until the second round of
> Intel-based Mac laptops.  A colleague of mine got one of the
> first, and it had motherboard overheating problems.  I think
> that they're much better in that regard, now.

that is what my apple contacts have said, so i am not in a real
hurry as  long as i wait/procrastinate (grin) the better, the
more bugs, the less problems as it continues to move forward

> Good luck with the hardware hunting.  Most of it seems pretty
> good at the moment.

i've got a better idea of where, what, how i am going forward.
it largely depends on me finding a doog deskpot to run on
reliable 'laptop' so far apple seems to have it sownup with
some sort of (toshiba based) amd chipset hardware laptop with s
'live-cd' type environment installed as teh user desktop, be it
pc bsd or desktop bsd or whatever else is available on teh
shelf ..

thanks/appreciations

regards

jonathan

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