MacPro

It’s kinda nice and all, but seri­ously, so expen­sive. I’m sure the parts are all really high qual­ity, but that I can source pretty much all upgrade options offered for half the price or less — for exam­ple, adding a mea­gre two 512MB sticks costs an obscene $AU499, whilst even the most ridicu­lous gamer-marketed RAM (you know the stuff, it’s sup­pos­edly ‘tuned’ in pairs, etc.) can be had for $135 for two 512MB sticks (OCZ brand) — is rather telling about their hor­rific markup.

And yeah, I’m sure it’s all great qual­ity and mag­i­cally never crashes and all the rest of that mar­ket­ing crap. Good for you guys. I’m gonna wan­der back over the other side of the room here and install Win­dows on my equally-powerful sys­tem for, oh, about 40% of the cost. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of your mon­i­tors. I can pick up an equiv­a­lent Dell 30″ for $600 less than your offer­ing… and if I’m con­tent with a mea­gre 23″ then I can get a 24″ Dell for $400 less! Even the 20″ screens are $500 apart. Seri­ously, it’s com­pletely unjus­ti­fi­able and no-one in their right mind should be pre­pared to spend that much more for a brand.

Sigh.

I need to open a buy-a-new-computer account and start putting money into it. Well not really… I just need a new hard­drive and var­i­ous soft­ware licenses I guess. I think I’d miss Ubuntu too much (maybe)… I don’t even know why, nearly every­thing I can do here I can do in Win­dows (haha — does any­one else notice the beau­ti­ful inver­sion of that argu­ment? I actu­ally think I’ve been run­ning Linux for too many years now to have posted about it in any currently-stored online blog entries! Crazy) except any­thing requir­ing a ter­mi­nal. That’s almost def­i­nitely my great­est frus­tra­tion, but no mat­ter. I need soft­ware that doesn’t run in Linux and is too inten­sive to work well in vir­tu­al­ized con­di­tions. Best option for me would be to get a whole sep­a­rate com­puter, but then… well, this thing can feel flaky after being on for two weeks. Win­dows I’d prob­a­bly get that every two days or so, but at least I’d think to reboot. Here, I just kill processes and at worst logout. Ker­nel patches are the only thing tak­ing this down, basically.

Moral of the story… some­thing like don’t waste your money on a shiny new Mac.

# by Josh on August 8th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| 9 Comments »

World’s biggest system monitor?

My cur­rent project (as of a few days ago, noth­ing long term ;)) is get­ting a work­ing php­Sys­Info page with trippy tem­per­a­ture mon­i­tor­ing and other such kah-razy features.

So, I grabbed the lat­est from the SF CVS server (2.3-cvs) and installed it, because my old ver­sion (2.2-release) has some seri­ous issues with SuSE’s way of doing things — it “worked”, sans Mem­ory Usage and miss­ing much of the Hard­ware Infor­ma­tion.  Not that that is really rel­e­vant any­way, see­ing I (of course!) wanted to try out the latest.

I’m not sure if 2.2 sup­ported the trippy hard­ware mon­i­tor­ing thing, but even if it did, I’m over it already ;)  2.3 has a nicer ver­sion num­ber :p

Yeah.  So.  Hard­ware mon­i­tor­ing.  I down­loaded a few (it sup­ports 4 dif­fer­ent back­end pro­grams) and tried to com­pile — xmb­mon down­loaded and com­piled fine (well, okay — mbmon com­piled fine, the x exten­sion didn’t… not that it mat­ters, because for my pur­poses I only want the CLI ver­sion)… except it’ll fail except when run as root.  It’s a doc­u­mented prob­lem, although the only ref­er­ence to it was in rela­tion to *BSD sys­tems, and the fix refers to some kernel-related file which appar­ently doesn’t exist.

So I gave up on that… it was prob­a­bly a sur­mount­able prob­lem, but still, other peo­ples code scares me off.  Mov­ing on to the next (non-BSD-only) option!

LM Sen­sors… hey, that’s okay.  Relies on ker­nel hooks, which prior to 2.6 ker­nels involved rolling your own with an i2c exten­sion com­piled in.  I am, for the first time, as great­ful as I should be for SuSE’s lean towards the cutting-edge!  Hmm.  That said, LM Sen­sors appar­ently won’t com­pile with­out ker­nel source.

So.  I want to install a 780KB app, and wind up down­load­ing ~700MB of stuff!  Hmm.  This works, really it does.  Ker­nel sources are only ~180MB (at least, the SuSE respir­i­tory RPM’s are that big… last time I checked the size of the ker­nel (admit­tedly, that was back when 2.4 was the new thing), it was about 60MB!), but I got dis­tracted in package-selection, and saw that a newer ver­sion of Opera was avail­able, so I grabbed that.

Appar­ently the old ver­sion of Opera had no prob­lems at all with­out a cer­tain depen­dency, but this lat­est one requires Eclipse… a ~170MB Java library thingo.  At least, I think that’s what it was… OSS is way too trust­ing with depen­den­cies!  Hehe.

So after hav­ing down­loaded all that, I’m think­ing the com­pile still isn’t going to work!  Doh!

Ah well.  php­Sys­Info is still cool ;)

# by Josh on July 16th, 2004 Tags: , , , , ,
| No Comments »