I bought a new MacBook Pro 15.4" from Cool Apple Buddy on Thursday. Needless to say I was extremely excited since a significant upgrade to the ageing G4 processor was long overdue. I actually wanted the 17" since I currently own a PowerBook 17" 1.67GHz model, but none are currently available. Unfortunately this was the biggest mistake I made in a long time...
See, the notebook had random hangups. I would do a network copy, XCode install and then tried to launch Firefox - just to see the UI hang indefinitely. I ran AHT and found two errors - 4MOT/1/40000002:LeftUpperFront as well as 4SNS/1/40000000:'TCOP'. Whatever that means. From what I gathered it means a fan is broken and something else too.
Furthermore - the screen does not tilt back far enough to my liking. It is fine if you mount your notebook on those plastic platforms - but not if you work with it on a desk like I do.
When I was in Std. 8 many centuries ago, I swore on my own grave that I would never touch a computer since I hated it. Somewhere during that year I started breaking that promise and became more and more involved with computers. Today I realized I am back at that day - the day I swore I'll never touch a computer...
There are too many reasons to mention them all. Let me discuss a typical day - today.
I just bought a new Apple Cinema 23" display for my brand new MacBook Pro 15.4" notebook. I eagerly unpacked them and connected them up. I almost fried my eyes with the 23" LCD panel - its brightness was just way too high. So I adjusted it to its lowest setting. Lo and behold - at the lowest setting it is as bright as my MacBook Pro at its highest setting. For any other environment than a public office building with a bright window behind you, that is just too bright to work comfortably with. And I have 4 dead pixels. So I spent R11,000 on a display that is too bright to be usable for extended periods and has 4 dead pixels. Fine - I can live with that... For now.
It seems M$ is in trouble... They do not have money to buy enough RAM for their servers... Look:
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Please see this blog why the forums had been decommissioned.
Today I have decommissioned three of my web portals. The common factor? All three sites were forums using phpbb's PHP based free forum software. Why?
Because I got tired and pissed off having to constantly update the software due to security holes. Every couple of weeks I saw a red warning message in the version area of the software - informing me of YASH (Yet Another Software Hole).
Some people might believe that is a Good Thing - software automatically informing you about new updates. In general that is nice, however in this case I would have felt much better if there had been no holes - or at least more realistically a hole a year. Take OpenBSD - their clame to fame is