Re: hosers-talk: i love fedex

["Jon Stewart" <stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> You running X, Jon? My TA was running it on his Book in class today.
> Pretty swank. And everything had unixy filenames, heh.


Yes, I haven't even booted up Classic yet, though I probably will when I
get my old shit transferred over. FWIW, OS X boots up fast, except it 
hangs a little when it looks for my network (which doesn't exist).

The iMac doesn't come with the Developer Tools CD, which was very
disappointing. So, I spent the $20 and ordered it off Apple's site. It'll
be a whole lot more useful when I get those. I don't think PHP or MySQL is
installed on it either; Jordan Hubbard needs to get busy bringing over his
ports collection and getting it installed as a default. I might as well
put in my DSL order today, 'cuz I've got a whole lot of software to
download.

The transparent menus are kind of annoying, but the use of transparency in
general is kickass cool. I downsized the dock and anchored it on the left
side of the screen, so it's not that obtrusive. I haven't done anything to
really test out its speed... I watched a DVD on it last night and it
paused for half a second three times during the movie. That was annoying;  
y'know, nothing else was running. So, Apple needs to do more work on the
real-time aspects of Mach. But that's a common criticism and all evidence
suggests that Apple is working feverishly on such things, as it's so
important to them to have QuickTime solid. Ripping MP3s yesterday was
fast, varying from 7x - 9x speed (the varying speed suggesting that the
drive was the bottleneck). I'm not even sure if ye olde PowerTower can rip
at 1x.

The hardware can't be overemphasized, though. I know we're supposed to be 
geeks and impervious to design, but damn. It's bigger than it looks on 
TV/the net. Everything is a nice matte white, making it look like 
something right out of 2001; it screams Kubrick. The screen is about the 
same size as a 17" monitor, so it looks nice at 1024x768. They call it a 
15" screen -- as well they should -- but it's much bigger than a 15" CRT.

The thing's fucking heavy, too. It ain't gonna' tip. The arm is cool. It 
moves very easily, but it stays put. Supposedly it uses the same kind of 
mechanism as hospital lights (like in the OR or dentist's office), so I'm 
hoping it'll stay put for a long time to come.

One glitch: the ethernet port (which is 10/100). The case is slightly
translucent white plastic, same stuff they've used in the old iMac.  
Underneath it is a thin aluminum (I think) sheet. It looks like the sheet
has the ports stamped out. On my particular machine, the ethernet port is
blocked by a little metal tab that looks like it wasn't stamped out fully.
I called Apple to report it yesterday and it got escalated quickly enough
(after the guy verified that yes, I was looking at the ethernet port). So
I'm sure I'll talk to a semi-senior support person/engineer today. I'm
pretty sure I can flatten the thing out with my pliers, so as long as
ethernet actually works, I'm not going to send it back to Apple. For a
first-run product, that's a pretty minor problem; they just need to refine
the tolerances a bit. Still, it speaks to why one shouldn't buy a
first-run product unless necessary.

Going forward, the thing I'm most worried about is whether 1GB RAM will be 
enough. I'm at 512MB now, but I think it's likely I'll max it out in the 
next six months, as I use it as a server AND a development machine. 
Mmmm... Java, Apache, Tomcat, oh my! If I'm profitable enough, maybe I'll 
get a TiBook and use that for development and let the iMac serve.

Now I need to buy a digital camcorder so I can make my own DVDs. Ah, the 
beauty of the superdrive. Being able to burn 4.7 GB of data to an optical 
disk is a big selling point. Who needs a tape drive?



Jon
-- 
Jon Stewart
stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx

"and dropping a barbell, he points to the sky, saying 'the sun's not 
yellow, it's chicken.'"

			-- Bob Dylan