The optimist thinks the glass is half full. The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the real truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources.
Dale Andreatta, as quoted by Burkhard Bilger in the New Yorker December 21 issue’s essay Hearth Surgery .
Gizmodo: MacPro vs Hackingtosh
The fine folks at Gizmodo are running story titled The Best Alternatives to Every Apple Product. Curiosity killed the cat. And they nearly killed mine (the curiosity, not the cat). The comparisons are, in general, somewhat bland, but they leave the best for last: the “Mac Pro ($2,500) -> Hackintosh (far less $$$)”.
While the pictures accompanying each item are clearly not intended to be accurately representative (I suppose), the one for the MacPro item is somewhat misleading (or incorrect, depending on your take).
The MacPro on the left is placed opposite to a futuristic-looking system, which does look sassy. The case turns out to be Thermaltake’s Level 10 case. I almost want one. Newegg, always ready to provide some pricing guidance, breaks the news: the case itself sells for $849 (free shipping), but it’s only available as part of a DIY PC Combo. Ah, yes: $4,663.99. I haven’t compared CPU/memory/etc specs: that’s not the point.
Pictures (like, apparently, Gizmodo’s post) are filler, and no one is likely going to argue that they buy Apple products because they’re price sensitive, but pictures also offer context and visual clues (and are supposed to not be, at a minimum, fallacious).
When I nuked and paved the laptop, I cleaned up the virtual machine stable I had been hauling around for some time.
About two years ago I switched from Parallels (which had been working relatively well for me and was, for a while, the only option for the Mac) and went back to VMware (so that I could run VMs elsewhere if I needed to). Parallels 5 came out recently, and they had sent out an offer for a cheap update, so I decided to give them a try. I used their Virtual Machine Transporter to convert a Win7 beta VMware virtual machine, but Parallels ended up choking on it (it went into this loop where it wants to log the user in and out for the changes to the Shared Profile to take effect). I’m on the road, so I gave up quickly: I dislike getting beachballed into oblivion and having my laptop rendered into a hot molten pile of silicon (solid 100% CPU utilization). I uninstalled Parallels, wiped the virtual machine, installed VMware back and started the old VMware-based machine. For whatever reason, now VMware chokes on it too: the endless beachballing, CPU slaughtering… the works.
Sigh.
