Brent Stace’s Weblog

Well, I shipped out the laptop on Friday, June 24th, and I got it back this morning. Including the weekend, it only took 4 days. Overall, I’m very impressed with the repair and time it took to complete the repair. I’ve seemed to avoid all the problems other people have had. The repair summary looked like they pretty much just gave me a new motherboard. So, now, the Arbiter is back up at 1GB RAM.
Good news on the work front too. Things have gotten much better and, as of now at least, work is going well. If only my car was the same.

Just to let everyone know, I’m not going to be able to reply to email for a while or it will be sporadic in response because I will be sending my laptop off to Apple to get the lower RAM slot fixed. This way I’ll actually use the other 512 chip I got and life will be better. I still need to back up all my data incase I lose it all, but hopefully I won’t lose it all. Ug.

If anyone is interested in adding some songs to their music library I strongly recommend adding the Diablo II Expansion music. Wait, this is the good part…IT’S FREE!
Recently, especially at work, I’ve been interested in instrumental songs in the background as I do work. Game music is a great resource for this. So, today during lunch, I just decided to google “Diablo II Soundtrack” just to see if any place was selling it. Yeah, after following some links I found it. Some of this game music I think would appeal to not only people who have played Diablo II, but also people who haven’t. Anyhow if you’re interested, this is the link: http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/mp3/. You can find Diablo music (just a hint), Diablo II music, and Diablo II Expansion music there. 26 tracks - ENJOY!

Many opinions have been flying around about the WWDC news today regarding Mac’s running on Intel processors. This is my two cents.

The decision to switch to intel processors was a purely business decision for Apple.
Lets see, IBM couldn’t supply processors to what they said they could, AND they can’t make a nice one for laptops…Apple decided that IBM sucks for those two main reasons. Looks like to have to go with someone else. Supply/Demand. One question that I still have is why Intel? Why not AMD? They typically have better processors. I still don’t know this one, but they did decide on Intel.

My friend James thinks that the transition to intel will be a tough one…he cited that he thought Mac OS X 10.0 sucked until it was Mac OS X 10.1. He thinks that this Intel transition won’t be good for a while. I don’t think the transition will be tough at all. I’m thinking about more closely related history when I think about this…the transition from 68K->PPC (CISC->RISC). I remember this transition process when I was installing programs not knowing what to install for my Performa 600CD…68K code, FAT code, or PPC code. This was when I was aware that there was a transition going on in the early 90’s (transition I). So we’ll have FAT (universal) binaries floating around again, and some confusion until it’s all over…not that big of a deal.
I don’t see how changing from RISC to CISC makes anything better. Also, does anyone else think it’s ironic that we’re going BACK to CISC? Also, probably coinsodentally, this blurs the invisible line between the Mac Purists (pre-OS9 Mac heads), and the Switchers (converts, after 10). Both of these types of users will have to switch, so in a way we are all becoming switchers. It almost feels as if I’m being reduced in ranking.
I’m also not sure why the developers at the WWDC were wild in applause with this switch. (1) Who gets excited about more work? Especially since developers have been known to be inherently lazy. (2) Apple has been toating the G3-G5’s as being superiour to Intel’s counterparts, and now we’re downgrading. Sounding like Apple has lost a bit of what makes it unique (although Mr. Jobs tries to define that the OS is what makes the Mac unique), and that Apple is gearing itself more toward Ford-like computers by conforming to the standard Intel branded parts. Not sure why it’s good to eventually tune down all the products. But, I’m sure I won’t realize all the benefits of this switch until later. Maybe much later. Maybe all the developers at the conference know the benefits already and that’s why they were applauding.

It’s an annoyance for developers, yes. But, if it’s the only way to get a large amount of processors and a new laptop at a fair price so be it. So yeah, this may reduce the price of Macs in the future. Like I said, business driven.

Also, as a side note, I was kinda disappointed that they only really talked about Intel on Mac. I was expecting some more products, SW or HW. Oh well.

I read some part of this month’s MacWorld, and I discovered some small things about tiger I over looked. Like the publishing of iCals to any location. You can now get iCals (calendars) of my increasingly trivial life at www.brentstace.com/icals. The iCals on the web are updated when I update them locally on my computer . There is a webpage set up there to direct you to the correct file names of the iCals (yeah I know, that will help!).

And, as for the remainder of this week…lets see what WWDC 2005 provides for us. And Just to get it out there with the Intel/Apple talks, James brought up an interesting point that may happen, Intel may supply Apple with PPC chips..now wouldn’t that be different, and def. welcome among the developer community b/c then the developers won’t have to change their code big-time…AGAIN!