If you're a Windows sysadmin like me and have heard:
Macs are faster than PCs
RISC is faster than CISC
Unix is faster than Windows
Mac OS X is faster than Windows
let me give you this bit of warning before you waste money and time buying 2nd hand Macs and Unix workstations to play with:
Macs and Unix (as long as they are NOT on Intel hardware) is not as fast as Windows.
I've used Sun Ultra Sparc 5's, and Blades 100 and 150. These machines cannot do 1280x1024x32 so using them on your 19inch LCD is a no-no unless you're happy to go with a lower resolution or colour-depth. Secondly their video performance is dreadful. A great set of real world tests is to use Firefox to visit the following websites:
* smh.com.au
* hsv.com.au
* trailers.apple.com
Don't just visit the above sites. Scroll thru the pages, load up links with tab browsing and view video clips and PDF files.
The Apple PowerMac G4s can do 1280x1024x32 easily. Problem is, all of them suck when it comes to scrolling thru complex web pages like smh.com.au and PDF files. Similarly, emails with graphics imbedded take a long time to display compared to text only emails.
If you're going to get a Mac or Unix workstation to familiarise yourself with the Operating System Environment do yourself a favour and make sure it comes with an Intel or x86 chip.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
MP3 players and idiots
I was driving at the front of the queue in my lane and approaching a red light. On my right the cars in that lane had already stopped. Two car lengths from my intended stop this idiot walks straight across my lane from the rear of the first car in the right lane. He was looking down at the ground, ear phones plugged in and MP3 player in hand.
If the timing had been "right" and the lights had turned green upon my approach, who knows what might have happen.
If the timing had been "right" and the lights had turned green upon my approach, who knows what might have happen.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Sleeping with Mac OS X 10.4
One really positive great feature of OS 10.4 Tiger is the 'Sleep' function. Any time I want to leave the computer for an extended period of time all I have to do is click the Apple Menu and choose 'Sleep'. Within moments everything is quiet and my G4 emits a pulsating white light thru the power button. I have told the Mac to sleep and awaken many times over the last week and it hasn't failed me yet so I am thoroughly impressed and satisfied in that regard - not a single reboot!
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is a CPU hog
My 800Mhz G4 PowerMac (which Apple fans claim is the equivalent of a 1600Mhz Pentium 4) is running extra slow. It was already slow enough as it is. The hard disk was formatted and Tiger installed only a week ago. The apps I have running now are: Safari 2, FireFox 2, Terminal, and of course the Finder. I've only got a dozen tabs open in my browsers but 'top' is telling me my CPU is constantly being used. The idle time is consistently less than 50% - in other words, the CPU usage is constantly above 50% so everything is slow and LAGGY as hell even though I have 1GB of memory in here.
Friday, November 17, 2006
Suse Linux 10.1 aftermath
Well its been over 3 weeks since I installed Suse 10.1 on my 2nd production workstation at the office. I've been busy with other sysadmin tasks and haven't touched it in a while. Recently I used it and discovered the following:
Evolution is broken!! It just stopped working. Period. I tried a reboot but that didn't work! To even begin to compare it to Outlook is a joke. There is no way to resend emails, for example, if you have a daily need to send the same (or almost identical) email every day.
CUPS is broken. The Linux box just won't print. Deleting the printer and adding it back did not work at all. Contrast this to my production WinXP Pro box which gets hammered every day... and printing works ALL the time!
I've had enough of Suse 10.1. I would have thought a company like Novell would have done a better job, but NO!! Linux still sucks... BIG TIME!!
Evolution is broken!! It just stopped working. Period. I tried a reboot but that didn't work! To even begin to compare it to Outlook is a joke. There is no way to resend emails, for example, if you have a daily need to send the same (or almost identical) email every day.
CUPS is broken. The Linux box just won't print. Deleting the printer and adding it back did not work at all. Contrast this to my production WinXP Pro box which gets hammered every day... and printing works ALL the time!
I've had enough of Suse 10.1. I would have thought a company like Novell would have done a better job, but NO!! Linux still sucks... BIG TIME!!
Review of Suse Linux 10.1
After the buggy and painful experience of using Fedora Core 5 for 2 months in a real world office environment I have had enough. Since the very-recently-released Fedora Core 6 isn't easily accessible for the time being (late October) I downloaded the remastered DVD iso of Suse Linux 10.1 from opensuse.org (or rather, from one of its mirrors).
Using Windows XP and Getright and Nero to download and burn... that was the easy bit.
Upon taking the DVD to work I powered up my FC5 machine and inserted the DVD and booted from the optical drive. The Welcome screen appeared where I selected the 'Install' option. Lo and behold my near new Dell 1907fp 19inch LCD was unable to display the next screen. Fine. Restart and choose the 1024x768 option. Still no good. Fine!! Restart again and choose the Vesa option. Now I can see the screen!
Problem was my USB mouse no longer works. No, its not broken. It just doesnt work under this f**** Linux distro.
*** Never once in Microsoft's Windows OS did I ever have to fuck around with the mouse. Not in Win3.1, 95, not in NT, and not in Vista... but Linux... Linux can't even get that right. ***
Thank god the installer is accessible using only the keyboard. So I went about partitioning the drives and removing the default option of ReiserFS, the FS created by an alleged murderer. No thanks, and choose ext3.
Since it was an office PC I elected not to install any games. 2 hours later everything was installed on this little P4 1.8Ghz with 768MB RAM. During that time I checked up on the PC twice.. well what do you know... the mouse is working!!! I walked away, came back... and the mouse is now dead!!!!
The Install is finally over and I can finally log on without a mouse. Thats when it occurred to me... oh, oh.. how am I supposed to navigate around without a mouse. Indeed I can't. The Start key on the keyboard doesn't work on Linux (why can't Linux fuckheads get off their highhorses and bind the start key with the equivalent of the start menu?!?!?)
With Windows its very easy to navigate the GUI with just a keyboard. impossible with this Linux distro. So I killed the X Server and cleanly shut down the box. I powered it up again. Linux tells me my ext3 disk hasn't been checked in well over 48,000 days (thats over 132years) and proceeds to carry out a forced check.
Jesus Christ, if they can't even get the basics of the filesystem right how am I supposed to trust this OS?!?!?
Several minutes later the GUi logon appears and I log on. Lo and behold the mouse works!!!!!!!! I have a bit of a look around, checking out the Control Center, configuring Firefox for internet access and Evolution to connect to our mail server.
Grrr... this distro runs very noticeably slower than Fedora Core 5. The GUI is not as snappy. Worse still Firefox is a pain to use since clicking in the 'Address' bar does not respond but pauses around for an awfully long time. It still suffers from the stupid "'save my username and password' so that I don't have to enter it in again next time for the Proxy Server to let me out"
problem.!!!
Evolution works but for some reason I am unable the see the Global Address Book on Exchange. Heck, it worked under FC5!!!!
But Evolution is not replacement for Outlook, not even close. Emails appear with double carriage returns instead of just the one empty line and its not possible to resend existing emails with just a couple of clicks. Initial startup is slow compared to Outlook and the default view of 'sort by date' has the newest emails at the bottem... oh please!!! Which clown wants to
scroll all the way down to check for the latest emails?!?!?
I go into the start menu again and whats this... Games!!! heaps of games installed... WTF!!! I told it not to install any games!!!!!
In other news I am able to connect to a network printerd controlled by a Windows 2003 server and print to it successfully. Thank gooodness. Unfortunately I'm unable to browse the various Windows AD domains and workgroups we've got at our very large office.
It's late and time to do some real work so I'll leave it at that... for now.
Using Windows XP and Getright and Nero to download and burn... that was the easy bit.
Upon taking the DVD to work I powered up my FC5 machine and inserted the DVD and booted from the optical drive. The Welcome screen appeared where I selected the 'Install' option. Lo and behold my near new Dell 1907fp 19inch LCD was unable to display the next screen. Fine. Restart and choose the 1024x768 option. Still no good. Fine!! Restart again and choose the Vesa option. Now I can see the screen!
Problem was my USB mouse no longer works. No, its not broken. It just doesnt work under this f**** Linux distro.
*** Never once in Microsoft's Windows OS did I ever have to fuck around with the mouse. Not in Win3.1, 95, not in NT, and not in Vista... but Linux... Linux can't even get that right. ***
Thank god the installer is accessible using only the keyboard. So I went about partitioning the drives and removing the default option of ReiserFS, the FS created by an alleged murderer. No thanks, and choose ext3.
Since it was an office PC I elected not to install any games. 2 hours later everything was installed on this little P4 1.8Ghz with 768MB RAM. During that time I checked up on the PC twice.. well what do you know... the mouse is working!!! I walked away, came back... and the mouse is now dead!!!!
The Install is finally over and I can finally log on without a mouse. Thats when it occurred to me... oh, oh.. how am I supposed to navigate around without a mouse. Indeed I can't. The Start key on the keyboard doesn't work on Linux (why can't Linux fuckheads get off their highhorses and bind the start key with the equivalent of the start menu?!?!?)
With Windows its very easy to navigate the GUI with just a keyboard. impossible with this Linux distro. So I killed the X Server and cleanly shut down the box. I powered it up again. Linux tells me my ext3 disk hasn't been checked in well over 48,000 days (thats over 132years) and proceeds to carry out a forced check.
Jesus Christ, if they can't even get the basics of the filesystem right how am I supposed to trust this OS?!?!?
Several minutes later the GUi logon appears and I log on. Lo and behold the mouse works!!!!!!!! I have a bit of a look around, checking out the Control Center, configuring Firefox for internet access and Evolution to connect to our mail server.
Grrr... this distro runs very noticeably slower than Fedora Core 5. The GUI is not as snappy. Worse still Firefox is a pain to use since clicking in the 'Address' bar does not respond but pauses around for an awfully long time. It still suffers from the stupid "'save my username and password' so that I don't have to enter it in again next time for the Proxy Server to let me out"
problem.!!!
Evolution works but for some reason I am unable the see the Global Address Book on Exchange. Heck, it worked under FC5!!!!
But Evolution is not replacement for Outlook, not even close. Emails appear with double carriage returns instead of just the one empty line and its not possible to resend existing emails with just a couple of clicks. Initial startup is slow compared to Outlook and the default view of 'sort by date' has the newest emails at the bottem... oh please!!! Which clown wants to
scroll all the way down to check for the latest emails?!?!?
I go into the start menu again and whats this... Games!!! heaps of games installed... WTF!!! I told it not to install any games!!!!!
In other news I am able to connect to a network printerd controlled by a Windows 2003 server and print to it successfully. Thank gooodness. Unfortunately I'm unable to browse the various Windows AD domains and workgroups we've got at our very large office.
It's late and time to do some real work so I'll leave it at that... for now.
The truth about non-x86 computers
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/53813.html
Quote: "Macs have virtually unlimited life spans, as reflected in their resale value. Macs are fast, their chassis are indestructible, and OS X is solid as a rock."
What a load of garbage. I purchased a 2nd hand 233Mhz 64Mb RAM PPC (made in 1997) in 2001 to learn more about the Mac. The machine was barely usable running OS 8.6. The machine was chocked full of dust and the metal bits were rusted. Fans and optical drive suffered from the usual problems (i.e. they were 1/2 dead).
I picked up an 1998-era imac from work in 2002. Once again, slow at running OS 9.1 and impossible to bare running OS X 10.1. The machine promptly died a few weeks later. In 2003 I got an el cheap blue G3 tower (1999 era) off ebay. Chock a block full of dust and the CDROM was on its way to the grave and so was the HD. I promptly returned the tower to the seller siince it would not install OS X as advertised.
Conclusion: Macs are no better than PCs. Given real world conditions (dust, grime and the occasional mishap) they all end up the same way. I have yet to experience any non-PC in any given year (say, manufactured in 2005) outperform a PC manufacturerd in the same year in real world scenarios (web browsing with 50+ tabs, emails, scrolling, PDFs, office docs, etc). This includes 64 bit Sun Ultra Sparcs SunBlade 100 and 150s too.
Quote: "Macs have virtually unlimited life spans, as reflected in their resale value. Macs are fast, their chassis are indestructible, and OS X is solid as a rock."
What a load of garbage. I purchased a 2nd hand 233Mhz 64Mb RAM PPC (made in 1997) in 2001 to learn more about the Mac. The machine was barely usable running OS 8.6. The machine was chocked full of dust and the metal bits were rusted. Fans and optical drive suffered from the usual problems (i.e. they were 1/2 dead).
I picked up an 1998-era imac from work in 2002. Once again, slow at running OS 9.1 and impossible to bare running OS X 10.1. The machine promptly died a few weeks later. In 2003 I got an el cheap blue G3 tower (1999 era) off ebay. Chock a block full of dust and the CDROM was on its way to the grave and so was the HD. I promptly returned the tower to the seller siince it would not install OS X as advertised.
Conclusion: Macs are no better than PCs. Given real world conditions (dust, grime and the occasional mishap) they all end up the same way. I have yet to experience any non-PC in any given year (say, manufactured in 2005) outperform a PC manufacturerd in the same year in real world scenarios (web browsing with 50+ tabs, emails, scrolling, PDFs, office docs, etc). This includes 64 bit Sun Ultra Sparcs SunBlade 100 and 150s too.
Linux screensaver is broken!!
Configured my Gnome desktop to disable the screen saver. Clicked OK. Lo and behold, a few minutes later the screen saver comes up. You call this Open Source quality? It's garbage. This problem exists on both Fedora Core 5 and Suse 10.1 Remastered
Fedora Core 5 networking is st00pid
A while back disabled my ethernet interface on a Fedora Core 5 linux workstation at work on a Friday afternoon. I came in the following Monday morning and re-enabled it. Stupid Linux OS lost my default gateway and fucked up my CUPS.
You call this enterprise quality?!?!?
You call this enterprise quality?!?!?
Internet Explorer 5.2 is faster than Safari 2.0
Just discovered IE5.2 on the Mac is far more responsive than Safari!!! Yay!!! Now I can surf the web quicker!!! Go on, try it!! Visit any web site and use the cursor keys and scroll up and down. I dare ya!!
Why Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger sucks
Note: [AK] = Apple Key
The Finder sucks!!
Applications are stored in the /Applications folder and its very easy to navigate to that parent folder by pressing [AK]+[SHIFT]+[A]. The /Applications/Utilities folder is [AK]+[SHIFT]+[U]. To go to your Home folder press [AK]+[SHIFT[+[H]. These key combinations are easy to remember and use.
Problem is... the Finder must be active for those keystrokes to work!!! And that is a HUGE handicap. You can’t be in, say, Firefox and quickly jump to the file system. In windows it is an enormous advantage to be able to press [Start]+[E] or [Start]+[R] and browse the file system!!
The Dock is no substitute for the Windows Start Menu. It takes up an obscene amount of vertical space and the user customisable icon locations makes no real sense. There is no text to describe each icon unless you hover the mouse over the icon and pause there. Currently running applications are marked with a little black triangle on the dock which is no way visually as appealing as the Task Bar’s
Contrast this to windows where Start->Programs has everything you need. Programs are logically located in alphabetical order and menu items can include lots of little extras like additional apps and tools and Help files and READMEs. The Wndows task bar shits all over the Dock when it comes to determing which apps are currently running. Add to that the combination of [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[ESC] (which brings up the Task Manager) and you can kill any rogue apps quickly. The QuickStart bar on the Taskbar allows you to place every day icons like Outlook and Firefox for very quick access.
Applications that install a dozen icons are easily accessible on the Start Menu. Simply press the START key and hover your mouse over Programs!! With Mac OS X you have to switch back to the Finder, press [AK]+[SHIFT]+[A] and then double click, say, Microsoft Office, and then doubleclick Powerpoint.
Give me back my CD/DVD
In Windows I cannot remember the last time my optical drive swallowed my CD or DVD media and refused to eject it. Why do most Macs not have an eject button on the drive/tower faceplate?
When a CD/DVD media gets stuck, pressing the [EJECT] key on the keyboard does not work!! At the Terminal prompt, executing ‘drutil tray eject’ does not always work either, even if you have a burner. I’ve been told to restart the computer and hold down the right mouse button. What a joke: why must I close all my open browser tabs and documents and apps just to remove a CD? Why, oh why, is it so easy to get a CD stuck in the drive? All I did was browse the contents of the disc and now the sytem won’t let me have the disc back. This is not enterprise quality!!
HOME and END
In the Windows world pressing [HOME] takes you to the beginning of the line and [END] takes you to the position of the last text character. On the Mac, some apps do this, but many don’t. WTF?!?!?!? Instead I have to use 2 hands to press [AK]+[Left] or [Right Cursor]. Not friendly at all.
The Finder sucks!!
Applications are stored in the /Applications folder and its very easy to navigate to that parent folder by pressing [AK]+[SHIFT]+[A]. The /Applications/Utilities folder is [AK]+[SHIFT]+[U]. To go to your Home folder press [AK]+[SHIFT[+[H]. These key combinations are easy to remember and use.
Problem is... the Finder must be active for those keystrokes to work!!! And that is a HUGE handicap. You can’t be in, say, Firefox and quickly jump to the file system. In windows it is an enormous advantage to be able to press [Start]+[E] or [Start]+[R] and browse the file system!!
The Dock is no substitute for the Windows Start Menu. It takes up an obscene amount of vertical space and the user customisable icon locations makes no real sense. There is no text to describe each icon unless you hover the mouse over the icon and pause there. Currently running applications are marked with a little black triangle on the dock which is no way visually as appealing as the Task Bar’s
Contrast this to windows where Start->Programs has everything you need. Programs are logically located in alphabetical order and menu items can include lots of little extras like additional apps and tools and Help files and READMEs. The Wndows task bar shits all over the Dock when it comes to determing which apps are currently running. Add to that the combination of [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[ESC] (which brings up the Task Manager) and you can kill any rogue apps quickly. The QuickStart bar on the Taskbar allows you to place every day icons like Outlook and Firefox for very quick access.
Applications that install a dozen icons are easily accessible on the Start Menu. Simply press the START key and hover your mouse over Programs!! With Mac OS X you have to switch back to the Finder, press [AK]+[SHIFT]+[A] and then double click, say, Microsoft Office, and then doubleclick Powerpoint.
Give me back my CD/DVD
In Windows I cannot remember the last time my optical drive swallowed my CD or DVD media and refused to eject it. Why do most Macs not have an eject button on the drive/tower faceplate?
When a CD/DVD media gets stuck, pressing the [EJECT] key on the keyboard does not work!! At the Terminal prompt, executing ‘drutil tray eject’ does not always work either, even if you have a burner. I’ve been told to restart the computer and hold down the right mouse button. What a joke: why must I close all my open browser tabs and documents and apps just to remove a CD? Why, oh why, is it so easy to get a CD stuck in the drive? All I did was browse the contents of the disc and now the sytem won’t let me have the disc back. This is not enterprise quality!!
HOME and END
In the Windows world pressing [HOME] takes you to the beginning of the line and [END] takes you to the position of the last text character. On the Mac, some apps do this, but many don’t. WTF?!?!?!? Instead I have to use 2 hands to press [AK]+[Left] or [Right Cursor]. Not friendly at all.
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