sjh - mountain biking running linux vegan geek spice - mtb / vegan / running / linux / canberra / cycling / etc

Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
About

email: sjh@svana.org

web: https://svana.org/sjh
twitter: https://twitter.com/sjhmtb
instagram: https://instagram.com/sjhmtb

Other online diaries:

Aaron Broughton,
Andrew Pollock,
Anthony Towns,
Chris Yeoh,
Martijn van Oosterhout,
Michael Davies,
Michael Still,
Tony Breeds,

Links:

Linux Weekly News,
XKCD,
Girl Genius,
Planet Linux Australia,
Bilbys,
CORC,

Canberra Weather: forecast, radar.

Subscribe: rss, rss2.0, atom

←January→
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
          1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31            

←2005→
Months
JanFeb Mar
Apr May Jun
Jul Aug Sep
Oct Nov Dec

Categories:

Archive by month:

Wed, 12 Jan 2005

Author resources - 22:41
I am not, nor particularly want to be, an author, however there is a chance Jane does, or other people, so I think I should put this here. Neil Gaiman posted to his diary today "Everything you wanted to know about literary agents...". Mostly containing an email response from an editor he knows who could answer this well. The editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden has some sound advice, and provides a lot of interesting links on the subject or related stuff to things authors should research, or things authors should avoid.

[/various] link

Cute but overpriced - 14:59
So in the keynote at Macworld one of the items announced was a cheaper Mac with no screen, keyboard, mouse, etc. Just the box. Sure I can see this can be cool for people who want a Mac but have the other stuff already. Personally I just am not interested (I suppose to some extent because I am not stuck in the world of windows). The new computer, MacMini is a good size, about that of a cd drive by the looks of things. Definitely cheaper for the grunt available than the briQ (though not quite as rackable), however as this is not aimed at the rackable or smaller, market for servers, I would be far more likely to go for an x86-64 box and run Linux on it.

I saw a suggestion yesterday (prediction 3) that if Steve Jobs wants to spend some of the money in the bank to entice more people to Apple, he could with this new machine subsidise it by US $100 per unit, the person suggesting that thought the price may end up being around US $350 per unit, now after the announcement we see they cost US $499 per unit. Sure it is still cheap, but unless you have a hungering for MacOSX it is not cheap for the grunt. I am happy to run Linux, the price for a reasonably grunty MacMini in Australia (80 GB disk, 1 GB memory, 1.4 GHz G4) is over AUD $1400, for that in Australia (from eyo as an example) you could purchase a Shuttle Form factor 939 kit (SN95G5) ($440), Athlon 64 3200+ ($313.50), 1 GB Ram (2 512 Apacer chips) ($264) (2 means with the 939 you get much faster memory access), Radeon 9250L 128 MB AGP ($69.50), 200 GB Maxtor IDE HD ($193.60), Pioneer Dual layer capable DVD (all formats) writer (cdr etc also) ($132). AUD $1412.40. Same price, Linux would run a hell of a lot faster on this and it is still a small footprint sitting on your desktop.

I admit there are people out there who use MacOSX, and there are crazies out there who use windows, oh well IMO their loss. I also admit I am suckered a bit by the idea of a cd drive sized desktop to run Linux on, and I always thought the Apple Cube was cute, though overpriced. I also like running Linux on non x86 architecture (sparc, ultra sparc, m68k, powerpc sitting in my house, though turned off now days as I don't actually use the systems any more).

Update: Seen on Kottke just now, a flickr image with instructions on how to convert your iPod to and iPod Shuffle in three easy steps. Cute/Amusing, I agree with Mikal though, the price of the new device is pretty good for its capacity and size.

[/comp/hardware] link

home, email, rss, rss2.0, atom