Online Home of Derek Meister
Apple has updated their website with information on their latest offering: the Mac mini. A 6.5″ x 2″ computer starting at $499.
The box will come with a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4, 256MB of PC2700 DDR ram, 40GB harddrive and 32MB ATI Radeon 9200.
Needless to say, expect lots of arguments and flamewars from both the PC and Mac fanatics on computer forums for the next few weeks over just how powerful this new addition to the Apple lineup will be.
ExtremeTech.com has a review of Corsair Memory’s XMS XPERT DDR Ram which has an LED display on the ram itself.
I have to admit that I’m impressed with the Azureus bittorrent client software. While conventional wisdom says that anything written in Java will be slow and unstable, Azureus runs very well.
With the latest Java run-time installed, I’ve had the client open for days at a time without a single crash and my system is still responsive. The memory footprint is obviously larger than similar torrent clients, but the amount of features and plugins available for Azureus make it a personal favorite. The other advantage of being programmed in Java, of course, is the fact that the same software can be run from my Windows XP Professional machine as on my Ubuntu Linux workstation.
Thanks to a convenient birthday a mere week after the release date, I now have a copy of the highly anticipated PC game Half Life 2. Since this was a birthday gift and because the local Microcenter was having a sale on the game, I ended up with the retail boxed version of the game, versus the direct-download from Valve.
While I’m enjoying the game, I can barely imagine how frustrating the installation of the retail boxed game for the average Joe End-User. The box comes with a bunch of CD-Roms and absolutely nothing else, other than an advert for ATI video cards. No manual or even a slip of paper explaining the download and unlocking procedures that will accompany the game install.
The average person must have been dumbfounded to put the disc in and be greeted with a message saying that the install would take up to 60 minutes for the files to be unpacked, followed by another twenty-minute wait for them to be checked, thanks to the online registration and downloadable content system that is Steam.
If I was a reviewer for the game, I’d have to give three seperate scores at the end of the review. The Game Itself: 9/10. Steam: 8/10. Retail Box Set: 3/10.
I gave in to the temptation of trying out the 4.10 release of Ubuntu Linux (codename: “The Warty Warthog Release”).
The installation was mostly painless, with an installer that’s ncurses-based (ie, text versus graphics). It actually made me nostalgic for my first installation of Red Hat back in the 5.0 days. The only real problem I had was due to my wanting to keep the /home harddrive partition from my Fedora Core 2 install. There seemed to be a problem with the ext3 filesystem being sized incorrectly, so I simply told the installer not to use that partition and move on. After the operating system was installed, I added the partition to the fstab listing of directories and could use it just fine.
The install is relatively clean and lean, with the initial install consisting solely of a single CD-Rom, something that I’d not seen lately with the Red Hat / Fedora releases. There are a number of things for me to get used to, coming from years of experience with Red Hat and similar distros, most of them due to Ubuntu’s Debian base.
One particually interesting difference that’s particular to Ubuntu is the fact that the root account is disabled. The installer never asks you for a root password, because the first account you’re asked to setup is configured with complete sudo rights, which means whenever you need superuser access, you have to do it through sudo, rather than logging in as root. It’s different, but not as big a deal as I had thought, and I can see the security advantages of doing so.
Provided you have the internet access to make downloading and installing new software quick and painless through apt-get, and don’t mind getting down and dirty with some of the rough edges, it looks like a nice addition to the Linux family of distributions, particularly if you’re looking for a more cutting-edge Debian distro with a shorter period between major releases.