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computation
Mar. 7th, 2007 09:11 pmNothing abstract today. My new computer came in, and although it is sad to say something like this, it's kind of a strong experience. Suffice it to say, it is about 5-8 times faster than my ibook. Per core.
It is however, not giving me a warm feeling. It's a D--- (price was nice) and as such comes with Vista. Limited experience was as negative as you'd expect. Internet Explorer and AIM each locked-up, one after the other, within my first (and only) 5 minutes of use, right after a fresh install. Yes, really; and yes, despite two cores and two gigs of RAM. And yes, every time you launch an application, the screen goes dim and a modal dialog taking 80% of the screen asks if you REALLY meant to launch it. Sec-yoo-rit-ee.
[It's worth squeezing in here, that the eye candy is alluring. It is exactly that: candy, and the chunkyness of it more or less requires 1280x1024 to have much usable screen-space left, but it IS fun to play with.]
Fine, I say. I was just using D--- for the market efficiency of a large supplier and couldn't give a damn about the ball-and-chain of Vista Home Basic edition. Time to load up Ubuntu linux and liberate myself.
Except it wouldn't boot up; probably can't handle installing itself off a SATA dvd drive. I could likely handle it by whomping up a partition and bootstrapping up from that (will have to resize the vista partition and install a bootloader anyway). But then again, I was going with Dell to save money and time of building it myself - already, this is being chipped at. Googling around find only horror stories. Download and burn KNOPPIX liveCD which works very well; network card, all my RAM and both processors recognized, thus allaying the fears from the horror stories. Still to test: openGL, audio (as though I care - this is a work machine). Thus there is a proof of concept and it is just a matter of trading in time for as proper a linux install as I want.
Which is my point, and my growing experience. Spending time on this stuff is horrible. Just how horrible and how I've come to think that way, is the story of my life after undergraduate study, not to be discussed here. I finally understand why people don't use linux, although it's not going to deter me from using it for what I want to get done. But what I am doing is work, and work which is not getting my computer to work. Most of why most people get computers falls into these one of these two categories, and that is why intelligent people sometimes use windows. Although, really, they ought to get a Mac.
End of rant. Just moved some tasks over to the temporary knoppix machine, and time to get back to LEARNING.
It is however, not giving me a warm feeling. It's a D--- (price was nice) and as such comes with Vista. Limited experience was as negative as you'd expect. Internet Explorer and AIM each locked-up, one after the other, within my first (and only) 5 minutes of use, right after a fresh install. Yes, really; and yes, despite two cores and two gigs of RAM. And yes, every time you launch an application, the screen goes dim and a modal dialog taking 80% of the screen asks if you REALLY meant to launch it. Sec-yoo-rit-ee.
[It's worth squeezing in here, that the eye candy is alluring. It is exactly that: candy, and the chunkyness of it more or less requires 1280x1024 to have much usable screen-space left, but it IS fun to play with.]
Fine, I say. I was just using D--- for the market efficiency of a large supplier and couldn't give a damn about the ball-and-chain of Vista Home Basic edition. Time to load up Ubuntu linux and liberate myself.
Except it wouldn't boot up; probably can't handle installing itself off a SATA dvd drive. I could likely handle it by whomping up a partition and bootstrapping up from that (will have to resize the vista partition and install a bootloader anyway). But then again, I was going with Dell to save money and time of building it myself - already, this is being chipped at. Googling around find only horror stories. Download and burn KNOPPIX liveCD which works very well; network card, all my RAM and both processors recognized, thus allaying the fears from the horror stories. Still to test: openGL, audio (as though I care - this is a work machine). Thus there is a proof of concept and it is just a matter of trading in time for as proper a linux install as I want.
Which is my point, and my growing experience. Spending time on this stuff is horrible. Just how horrible and how I've come to think that way, is the story of my life after undergraduate study, not to be discussed here. I finally understand why people don't use linux, although it's not going to deter me from using it for what I want to get done. But what I am doing is work, and work which is not getting my computer to work. Most of why most people get computers falls into these one of these two categories, and that is why intelligent people sometimes use windows. Although, really, they ought to get a Mac.
End of rant. Just moved some tasks over to the temporary knoppix machine, and time to get back to LEARNING.
