Iran’s Ayatollah warns of ‘no pity’ for protesters, threatens to unleash his own mobs to crack heads. Iran goes all ‘zero-tolerance’ on its own.
Manhattan is a Mecca of wi-fi use.
Manhattan is a Mecca of wi-fi use. Go from Battery Park to Harlem without disconnecting.
Michael Schumacher to retire from F1 racing in 2006.
Michael Schumacher to retire from F1 racing in 2006. So, ‘only’ three more years of no one else having even a remote chance.
RyanAir’s Saddam-heavy new ads (in the UK) may be in bad taste, but they’re not in violation of any law.
RyanAir’s Saddam-heavy new ads (in the UK) may be in bad taste, but they’re not in violation of any law. When references to Baghdad Bob are outlawed, only outlaws will refer to Baghdad Bob!
A farewell to Apple.
It’s sad to say, but last weekend I have had to put my venerable Power Macintosh box into semi-retirement. The box was sitting there mostly unused and had developed a rather alarming amount of issues of late, so this seemed like the most sensible thing to do. After four years of use and countless upgrades, it got to a point where something was evidently wrong with the motherboard itself.
Actually the sad part is that this marks a parting of ways between myself and “The Computer for the Rest of Us.” For most of my computer-using life the Mac was a mainstay of my computing experience, ever since I discovered my dad’s work-provided SE30 back in 1999.
Why a parting of ways? Simply put, it’s become too damn expensive to have a Mac which will provide sufficient power to run the company’s current OS. OS X, despite years of tweaking, is simply much too heavy to run on a system which was not made in the past two years. I was not running an ‘antique’ — my system had a 500Mhz G4, which was the best available as recently as three years ago, with 512M of RAM, a fast ATA card to compensate for the G3’s rather anemic ATA33 built-in controller, a Radeon 7000 card, etc. However, OSX needs more horsepower than this in order to provide a decent computing experience. Most of my applications were running very sluggishly, especially Photoshop, which is kinda surprising when you consider that the Mac’s strength is supposed to be in graphics apps. Web browsers were, by and large, also slow to respond, with the exception of Safari, which is as yet unfinished. In short, there was a huge performance gap whenever I hit the KVM switch to alternate between either my Linux or XP boxes and the friendly-looking translucent blue Mac, so much so that gradually I rather lost the point of why I should do so.
It wasn’t power alone, however. The hardware was quickly starting to fall apart as well. While changing the CD-ROM drive in mine I accidentally stripped the power supply cable slightly — the drive bay on these things is a fairly exact fit for an CD-form drive, as opposed to being the ‘open’ type they use in PCs — so that restricted my upgrade options by removing one outlet from the power supply. Being a bit of a geek I went in search of a replacement power supply, and was told at the time that it was impossible to obtain the part alone, that I would have to ship the entire system back to Apple for repairs, at my expense of course because the warranty had long expired by then. Then, I started to find bugs in the USB subsystem when I hooked up the box on a USB-enabled KVM; OS X would often simply not wake up when I switched to the Mac. That issue rarely occurs on XP, and has yet to occur on Linux. This required a reboot. Which wasn’t all that annoying — fragmented filesystems aside — until the more recent versions of OS X, which tend to masquerade older Macs’ lack of power by committing more operations before the login screen appears. Eventually the delays grew much too frustrating, and increasingly the Mac sat idle. The most annoying hardware-related bug, however, came when I became unable to boot the system from a power-off situation by using the power button at the front of the system. If it was off, the only way to start it would be to open the case and press the two power reset buttons on the motherboard. This is clearly not a workaround endorsed by Apple, but I knew the hardware enough to know that it would work. Most people aren’t so knowledgeable.
To be continued…
Convicted double-murderer sues for right to get computer mags in prison.
Convicted double-murderer sues for right to get computer mags in prison. No doubt wants to ogle those motherboard centerfold spreads.
Nigerians throw hissy fit at The Register over e-mail conference joke.
Nigerians throw hissy fit at The Register over e-mail conference joke. But will they have a 419-point legal brief?
Microsoft gives up on developing Trusted Computing solutions, decides to acquire anti-virus company.
Microsoft gives up on developing Trusted Computing solutions, decides to acquire anti-virus company. Continuing on a long tradition of letting others do the hard work…
Australia recalls nearly 300,000 defective glow-in-the-dark condoms.
Australia recalls nearly 300,000 defective glow-in-the-dark condoms. Fun “down under” will have to be in the dark for the time being…
Brown: UK ‘not ready’ for Euro.
Brown: UK ‘not ready’ for Euro. Queen-less currency not yet on the horizon.