So, I've installed MacOS 10.4.8 on my PC. It's your run of the mill PC board from Gigabyte with an Opteron 165 (Dual core overclocker, cheap, check it out!) and 3GB RAM. I've got a lot of drive space, like 1.8T, on this box.

Anyways, I wanted to see if I could run MacOS on my PC. Well, after a little work, it runs. It runs well. In fact, I've been using it as my primary OS at home for about two weeks and it's been running stable. I have full CI/QE operating on my BFG 6800GT and dual monitors. Sound, net, it all works.

I downloads craploads of software. FCS (complete, 30GB,) the iLife DVD, Office:mac, Parallels, and I installed a copy of fink and MacPorts to play with.

It's certainly better then Windows. It's more enjoyable to use, and although MacOS isn't without bugs (you find strange little things here and there) it certainly hasn't had any serious problems. I mean, Windows is stable on this machine, and I wouldn't reboot XP for weeks at a time, but it still had dumb problems like Explorer hanging and such things.

All has not been wonderful in the land of MacOS, however. There's no good music players. Well, scratch that. iTunes is good. But it's certainly not great. It won't play WMA's. This is a problem for someone with over 4000 WMA's in addition to the 14,000 MP3's. You can convert them to MP3 with iTunes I believe, but I'd rather not convert already 192kbit WMA's to another lossy compression. It's not worth it.

There's Songbird, which shows promise, but it chokes if you have a music library large enough. I hope they fix it soon. It plays anything.

WinAMP won't run under crossover, and it seems silly to run an XP VM just to run WinAMP. It works, though, since Parallels Desktop is so good. It really blows the door off of VMWare (mac and PC) with video performance and sound quality. It's considerably slower on the backend then VMware workstation though - the CPU gets tied up easily and there's no obvious way to limit CPU usage for a virtual machine.

VLC is nicer on the Mac then the PC, just because of the way the menu bar has controls and the player can float like most apps. On Windows it's a little awkward if you use a skin, so you have to use the boring default Windows skin with VLC. VLC plays anything but has no media library.

Quicktime is pretty much the same as VLC as far as interface goes but plays less things.

I'm relegated to compiling and running Amarok, the KDE media player, installed with fink. This will be my second attempt at getting it compiled - I hope it works this time.

I hate the way applications are sorted. One giant bucket. I created a new sub-folder called "User Applications" and I dump new apps there into sub-folders. I found that if I moved out the default apple-installed stuff, when a new user logs on the dock will show all questionmarks because the links get broken. There's probably a way to fix it.

I had to install a utility called SteerMouse to adjust the mouse acceleration settings. The default MacOS mouse handling is like pushing your mouse through mud. The "slow" speed is always way too slow, and the acceletation too high. There's no good middle ground. SteerMouse fixes this. Apparently you can also install an MS Mouse driver but I didn't even go there.

I still don't like the menu bar, and it's a pain when you have multiple monitors. Lots of mouse rolling if you're working with an app off the primary screen. Maybe the new MacOS with it's "spaces" will help. You should have the option of putting a title bar on every screen, and have the last active window on that screen have the menu bar.

PowerPC apps do run slow, although it's not THAT bad. Office:mac runs okay. It's just an office suite, so it's fine. UB versions of most big name apps are available as updates or full packages already. But that leads me to the next thing:

Software. While Safari is a good browser, Firefox is much nicer. fink has allowed me to run many "Linux" apps that are better replacements for Windows apps then native OSX ones. Azureus is a great Bittorrent client (and not under Rosetta like the "official" BT client.) OSS rules.

The problem is that if you do more with your computer then media and Office, like play games, you're really buggered. I've witnessed first hand that you can play games on OS X. AOE3 runs fine, almost as fast as the Windows version. But there's just no titles, and the ones that do exist don't often play multiplayer with PC versions. It's a problem if you like games. Like a Mac with BootCamp, it sucks to boot into Windows just to play a game. This isn't really the fault of the MacOS, but it's a problem none-the-less.

But if you do like media stuff, there's a lot of it. Apple has been buying up a lot of software and releasing it for less money. Take Shake for instance - it used to cost $12K a seat from what I hear. Apple bought it, and released it for $400. Final Cut seems solid and is quickly gaining momentum in the pro-sumer videographer market. This is no doubt partly because Adobe has their heads up their ass with Premiere - Not only is a Premiere Pro not forthcoming on OSX, it's dog-slow on Windows. Really, it's slow. VERY DAMNED SLOW. I put together a small HDV video and it was like going old school with a Pentium 233Mhz and DV video. Avid Xpress and FCP have a lot less trouble working with HD content.

Spotlight is crap. It forever indexes everything, and eats up gobs of resources when it does so. I've tried the various work-arounds but it's unavoidable. And it's the only way to search.

File Systems. Yea, it's Microsoft's fault. NTFS is read-only on the Mac, but hopefully ntfs-3g will be ported or something. There's no good file system you can use that's accessible on both operating systems. I couldn't get the ext2fs to work on OSX (a lot of people have trouble with it) but the ext IFS for windows worked fine. MacDrive works fine on Windows, but won't mount read-write if Mac wasn't shut down properly and has no tool to check HFS disks. And it's slow. So, what are we left with? FAT32. Yea, wonderful. It works but it's scary on 500GB disks and you can't store files bigger then 4GB. (if anyone has a suggestion here, I'm all ears.)

Overall, this Hackintosh has been a lot of fun to play with. Really, it wasn't hard to get running. With so many things being USB, IEEE1394, and more "standard" in communication, Apple could make a few calls to some major vendors, get a little more driver support for MacOS, and release MacOS for general use. Or, they could stop outright trying to prevent it from running on a standard PC but offer it up as "unsupported."

I realize Apple makes shit loads of money on their hardware, but they've got a good product here and it's a shame they don't sell it.

I've used Vista and it's unimpressive. It's ugly, too. The black taskbar isn't bad, but the default powder blue window framing is nauseating and there's no way to change it. C'mon Microsoft, grow up a little.

I won't ever buy a Mac computer though, because they're TOO EXPENSIVE. I'd buy MacOS and Mac Apps, but not an Apple computer. --expecially now that they're REALLY just PC's. Before, they were "special" PC's because they used PowerPC chips. It would be one thing if they were a little bit more expensive then an HP or Dell but holy shit are the Mac's expensive. They're nice, yes, but they're sucky expensive.

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I still dislike the Mac community. Wait, that's unfair. There's a lot of great developers writing things for OSX. Fink and MacPorts are really great, and there's tons of little utilities to overcome the shortcomings of the default OS. But I really can't stand the whiny bitches I see all over digg and around the internet. All these lame ass "switchers" stories. Come on people, it's a computer. Use what works for you. I can firmly say now that I DO in fact like MacOS, but you guys gotta drop the 'tude. It's old and it only hurts your cause.

- you can't drag cells to create multiple formula cells or repetitive entries

- no syntax highlighting

- no scripting

- Text insertation block is larger than the cell size, covering the cell below, so it obfuscates nearby data which you might be referencing

Well I had real computer bug yesterday.

Well I say bug, it was actually a spider!

A Mac Mini was complaining about a RAM error on boot (3 beeps). So we cracked open the thing (no easy task in itself) and found a dead spider spread over the RAM module. Replaced the RAM module and the Mac was a happy Mac again.

Looks like the spider had managed to short out the RAM module somehow and died along with the RAM module.

On Tuesday, March 22nd, George W Bush made the following comment re: the Wiretapping controversy:

"I did notice that nobody from the Democrat Party has actually stood up and called for getting rid of the terrorist surveillance program. You know, if that's what they believe, if people in the party believe that, then they ought to stand up and say it."

Pure gold. For all the fussing and bullshit that has been made over this whole ordeal no one has actually done anything about stopping the program. The only things that have been done are mudslinging against Bush and attempts at gaining rank (Russ Feingold ... although it seems to have backfired).

I just spent most of the afternoon dealing with a spyware "infection" on a coworker's home PC. Ironically, this particular program claimed to be "antimalware". The only malware on this guy's PC was this very program, which continuously popped up an annoying balloon warning how his PC is infected with malware. Well duh. Malware pretending to be "antimalware". How clever. Well, I guess this ruse works on a lot of people who have better things to do than be computer experts, but it's a lowdown, dirty trick.

Unfortunately, Norton Antivirus 2003 with the latest virus pattern saw nothing wrong with the computer. I'm thinking that spyware protection became a feature in newer releases, but it's still disappointing that this wasn't even detected as a trojan. Then again, the malware may have escaped detection because it was probably just a collection of registry settings designed to download and activate its buddy SpyAxe, which is the real trojan. A .reg file from F-Secure fixed the problem when I imported it into the Windows registry. (Thanks, F-Secure!) Anyways, the first thing I had to do when I arrived was to delete a 101 GB junk file from the user's temp directory, which was sized just right to completely fill up his hard disk, so that Norton Antivirus could not run. Cute.

Purveyors of spyware are almost as low as spammers in my reckoning. They cause innumerable man-hours to be wasted in clean-up and prevention, and ruin the computing experiences of countless victims. They are scum, like spammers and terrorists. I suppose that they are profiteers, benefiting through click-fraud, identity theft, and unethical information gathering. I believe that in general, these spyware and spam people exact a far greater toll on society than do the "hackers" (who are often just script kiddies) that we are so often warned about. Admittedly, there must be some overlap between the groups, but these spyware-slinging con artists especially irritate me. They take advantage of user gullability and the woeful design flaws that are Windows' legacy, for malicious ends. Fie on you, Spyware!

Oh noes!

Despite the fact that my last "going away" JE never had anything to do with me going away (uh, go reread it fellers), a lot of people took it as such.

Alas, however, I waste far too much time with the morons on this site, so I must bid you adieu. My password has been blindly changed to random gibberish, and the email address changed to one I no longer have access to.

To those of you with at least half a brain, thanks for the laughs. To the rest of you?

Go sit on a unicorn's face and spin. Don't forget to think fondly of me in your last moments you pathetic, bloody morons.

I will get each and every one of you before I'm done here.....

I'M A RAGE-A-HOLIC! I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT RAGE-A-HOL!

Why?

Because unlike extremist, mysognistic, homophobic, pompous morons like Santorum, Arlen Specter is a level-headed, moderate guy who knows what he's doing.

Yea, you don't see that a lot in government these days. You see cocklickers who hate women, minorities, and freedom getting nominated for high court positions.

Oh well. Like I told Brent, 13 years from now we'll be in the grips of one of those dirty liberals while he/she rebuilds from the disastrous mess caused by the conservatives again, and the idiot public will then vote another whacked-out conservative to wreck all that progress all over again.

Constant cycle. The cons destroy what the progressives build. Sad, sad cycle.

A man who believes the only thing lower in the pecking order than a dirty liberal is a dirty whore out of her burkha.

There's nothing that warms the cockles of my heart quite like a guy who argued that a woman who gets raped, deceived (e.g. - tampering with birth control), or beaten by her husband can't get an abortion unless she... asks her husband if it's okay.

Nice. Way to go righties. You're real outstanding examples of the human species. Thanks for spreading the love.

... like the one the conservatives gave to Harriet Miers?

Oh.... wait.

Word on the wire is that Bush is none to happy with some of his top advisors for their roles in the unpleasant negatives that have been heaped on his administration lately for the botched Katrina response and failed Miers nomination, not to mention that niggling little problem with Fitzgerald and the potential for an intentional national security breach at the highest levels of the executive arm of the government.

Reports say that Bush may have lost confidence in three of his top advisors, notably Rove and Cheney.

The Bush legacy is in its death spiral because all of its miserably corrupt and incompetent behavior from the beginning has caught up. Now it's time for people to face up to the facts. Which side were they on, the side that called bullshit from the beginning, or the side that's now so rapidly backpeddling on five years worth of mindless marching-order support?

Pathetic.

Naturally, the first place I thought to post this undirected thought process was on the /b/ (random) board of 4chan about 7 minutes ago, albeit with a significantly more obscene trailer.

Because I know when I think 4chan, I think intellectual clarity.

According to string theory, our entire universe is compromised of subatomic 1-dimensional strings vibrating at specific frequencies.

In addition, there's an idea out there that our Universe is just one of many floating on 'branes'.

Well, I was thinking... what if the ways in which gravity "distorts" our universe (e.g. massive objects like black holes and enormous stars have a huge distorting effect and smaller planets and planetoids and molecules have smaller and minute effects) is just the way in which the brane we're floating on is told how to "vibrate".

That would mean that, potentially, our entire universe appears as a 1-dimensional "string" to outside observers, and as only a limitlessly tiny portion of a whole other, much larger (from our perspective) universe.

That would also mean that the 1-dimensional strings WE percieve might be entire universes.

Alright, folks, try and stay with me here as we think through this and try to figure out why the United States public is getting fed up with the Bush administration and our current political "leaders"...

September 2001 you get these psychobastards who slam some planes into a couple of buildings and a field. This pisses a lot of people off, it's a uniting thing, symbolism, rally point, etc. Everyone says "GO GET 'EM BUSH" and Bush does. By golly, he says "this guy did it!" and he goes over there and this guy's a real bad guy so everyone is like "SEND A MOAB UP HIS HAIRLESS CORNHOLE!" and Bush is like 'no wait, guys, let's see if fuck fail Taliban will turn him over and save us some time, money, and lives'.

Fuck fail Taliban fuck fails and doesn't, so we're all like DIE MOFO and we kick their asses and send 'em packing and everyone is like "OH BOY, YAY!".

But Bumholeman goes running into some caves and hides and he's all like "OH SHI-!". So for awhile we're looking for him and then Bush is all like "ummmm I don't think about him much anymore" and American Public is sort of like "he say whut guy?". But they don't think so much of it because airplane bombs were years ago, so Bush is all like "SADDAM IS A BAD GUY, LET'S GO GET HIM!"

Then there's schism and smart people are like "asshole is he, threat he is not" and everyone else is like "shawt up or I'll punch ya'lls necks".

So then there's like 49% of people who are like "no wait, Bush is fuck fail now" and then 51% votes and he wins election this time and John Kerry cries and he's like "but I got shrapnels" but nobody cares so he goes back to the Senate and votes for some more stuff before he votes against it. Or maybe it was the other way around.

So anyway, people are like "hey man, whut with checking account? Savings account is fuck fail too!" and Bush is like "uuh" and then people are like "oh man too much debt no money, gotta bankrupt" and Bush is like "NO YOU PAY CORPORATIONS BECAUSE THEY'RE BETTER THAN YOU" and peolpe are like "whoa what?".

So then Katrina comes and is like WHOOOOSH BOOM! And bush is like 'lol nigers' and then people are like "man FEMA fuck fails too now". And Brown is like "lol horses are great" and Bush is like "good job!" and then people go "no, you fail".

Then Tom DeLay is like "YOA HERE'S SOME MONEY" and badass guy with a paper clip is like "YUO FREEZE!". Tom DeLay is like "Whoa whut, no I did nothing!" and then people are like "man you fuck fail corrupted n00b". And then Frist is like "OH SHI-" and then they notice him and are like "Yuo next n00b lol".

Then anyway, Bush is like "lol Miers" and people go "umm, whut" and then he has to withdraw her because she's illiterate. Then Lewis Libby gets indicted and Karl Rove is like "woo that close" and Bush is all :I "OH SHI-!"

And that's where we are today.

Questions?

Fiztgerald will be asking the grand jury to indict Lewis Libby in relation to the Plame fiasco. Nothing about Rove... yet.

I'm giving 3:1 odds that Bush does not fire any high-level White House official indicted in relation to the Plame investigation even though Scott McClellan orignally stated that Bush had said "anyone in this administration ... involved in it [the Plame identity leak] ... would no longer be in this [the Bush] administration".

You can place your bets at the open window in the lower half of the 9th circle of Hell. Mr Libby will be on display so you can look him over prior to the shootout (we regret to inform you that Mr. Rove will NOT be available for review as his lack of ethical standards has resulted in a permanent ban from heaven, hell, and most locales outside of Las Vegas and Washington D.C.).

BUSHCHENEY4LIFE: We're just like Elliot Ness's gang, except we wear the black hats!