December 23, 2006
Git a Mac?
After bad mouthing the Mac commercials, my trusty old laptop that I use as a personal computer has died and I suspect a virus. It got real slow a week ago, and now will not boot: ntfs.sys is corrupted.
The OS disks are an image, so I cannot recover my existing files on a repair. As it is truly a personal machine, there is no great loss if I just wipe it clean, but it will take me a day or two to rebuild and reload the applications I like. And there are always a handful of things that are truly lost.
Rats ass. Any email sent after yesterday afternoon is likely lost to the aether.
I develop in the Microsoft world so a Mac would really not be an option. But I won't bad mouth them again -- I'm sure that's what got me last time. "I, for one, welcome our new Cupertino overlords..."
Posted by jk at December 23, 2006 5:28 PM
You can always dual boot the new Intel Macs...
or with Parallels you can run both simultaneously.
;)
Posted by: AlexC at December 23, 2006 7:22 PMLinux, man.
Linux, Linux, Linux, Linux, Linux, Linux, Linux, Linux, Linux.
And did I happen to mention Linux?
You can run dual-boot with Windows (or treble(?)-boot, or more if you want), you can launch from a LiveCD or a bootable flash disk... Linux gives you options, man! And it won't hose your personal data.
Posted by: Ian Hamet at December 24, 2006 8:42 AMOS chatter always brings out more passion than religion or politics. Too bad Ian doesn't have an opinion...
I might think about this. I have an old machine I can use while I ponder. I develop on two company provided WIntel boxes, so I could use Linux or Mac as my tertiary platform (a fancy name for the machine I goof off and blog on). If I give up the idea of recovering data from the dead machine, I might load Linux on it.
I have RedHat9 install media lying about. Anybody have kernel recommendations? If my accountant should say new hardware is an option, the Mac would dual boot (and you can break out to a BSD shell as well, right?) Kind of a compromise candidate for all three...A Baker/Hamilton OS... I dunno...
Posted by: jk at December 24, 2006 12:01 PMAs evidenced above, Linux is the Unix-like OS for fanboys who hate Microsoft. FreeBSD is the Unix-like OS for people who like Unix.
Of course, MacOS is generally underpinned by FreeBSD, but it's only there if you want it.
Coincidentally, I saw this article this morning on Digg.
More PC Buyers Will Be Going Mac in 2007
Posted by: AlexC at December 24, 2006 12:21 PMFanning the flamewars, brother ac, playing with matches.
I think your link is correct. Several people have asked me about Macs lately. I think they all expected me to try and talk them out of it, fill their heads with cool reason. I disappointed.
At the same time. I was looking at sub-$600 desktops on BestBuy.com. That gets a feller a gig of memory and a 200GB or so hard drive, which would rock for my purposes. The Mac in that price range is 600-800 and only gets you 512MB and an 80GB drive. Add to that some software that I own in Win32 format.
I know the high-end PowerBooks and multi-processor boxes are sweet, I just question how well they complete in the low-mid sector, which is all I need right now.
Posted by: jk at December 24, 2006 2:05 PM | What do you think? [5]