Sunday, November 05, 2006

64Bit Heaven

I've just purchased one of Dell's new AMD based laptops which were launched last week. It's an AMD Turion x2 with a couple of gig of RAM. I can't deny I'm excited. The thought of having a 64Bit dual core laptop fills me with immense pleasure.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can I stroke it ?

Mostly Ordinary said...

Nerd ;-)

dizzy said...

anon - no, you may not stoke it. She's all mine.

Paul - yes, and proud.

Croydonian said...

I'm not even remotely jealous. No not at all.

(seethe seethe)

The Hitch said...

Do you have a woman in your life Dizzy?

dizzy said...

yep, married with one kid.

Anonymous said...

I don't quite know how to tell you this...you've BOUGHT A PC! I'm so sorry...Still, you're not the first one to have done that, so there's no need to beat yourself up over it. Easy mistake to make. Just take it back and say you'd like the money back...to buy a mac. THEN feel the pleasure.

dizzy said...

I don't quite know how to tell you this... you've got a PC too. Apple moved all their new range over to x86 architecture about nine months ago. The only difference between a PC vendor and Apple on that point is that Apple charge through the roof for what is essentially cheap hardware because they know that there's one born every minute.

You're also asusming that I'm going to be running Windows on it. I won't be. I'll be running Linux, although I may run OSX - oh did you not know I can have a Mac without paying through the nose if I wanted too?

It's you who should be taking your Mac back and telling them you've realised now that you've been conned into buying commodity hardware at double the normal price because you've bought the line that it's somehow superior when actually it isn't at all.

You can then get yourself an identical piece of kit and with the change buy a spare, and then have the freedom to choose what operating system to run on it rather than being locked into OSX which is only Unix anyway.

Apple are worse than Microsoft at restricting peoples freedom to choose what they run.

Anonymous said...

hehe...That's a terrific retort Dizzy!
I concider myself fabulously told off! AND humiliated! And to top it all, quite possibly converted.

I'll save your words for future reference and never mock anyone ever again.

Cheers!

Unknown said...

I go to bed and hug my new laptop (when the wife isn't looking).

120GB Hard Drive, 2GB RAM, 800MHz Turon 64x2 too.

I feel your warmth ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Anonymous said...

Actually, the price of a mid-range non-laptop Mac is quite reasonable nowadays.

OSX is more stable than Windows and more compatible than quite a few Linux distributions. The OS design is far more sensible and secure than most, a concept that the others tried to emulate. I mean, which OS was the first to properly implement memory management, handle locking (so your memory block didn't wander while you were using it), mulit-threading, thread priorities, all the things we can't manage without nowadays ?

And you can always use BootCamp to run Windows or Linux if you want too. It's so much more portable. Someone even got PDP-11 emulation working (now I'm showing my age) in case there are any type-setters out there.

dizzy said...

Actually, the price of a mid-range non-laptop Mac is quite reasonable nowadays.

Not when comparative hardware and speed is the consideration point.

OSX is more stable than Windows and more compatible than quite a few Linux distributions.

I'll give you Windows bit, but I don't understand what you mean by "more compatiable". OSX is a locked down operating system to a very specifc and short hardware compatibility list. It requires you to hack the kernel in order unlock that. If you mean peripherals' support then frankly you're wrong. Linux is absolutely fine with pretty much any piece of peripheral commodity hardware these days as they use standrard interface protocols like firewire, USB 2.0 etc.

The OS design is far more sensible and secure than most, a concept that the others tried to emulate.

errr it's a slightly altered BSD kernel (for which the code is freely available) with POSIX. Nobody has emulated MAC at all, they've emulated UNIX.

I mean, which OS was the first to properly implement memory management, handle locking (so your memory block didn't wander while you were using it), mulit-threading, thread priorities, all the things we can't manage without nowadays?

The first OS to do that was UNIX. Which variant will obviously come down to how one defines "properly", but let's look at this way, who runs OSX has a high-availability mission critical server? No one. Either way though it wasn't OSX that got there first.

And you can always use BootCamp to run Windows or Linux if you want too.

Why on earth would I want to dual boot a system in Linux when I could as easily compile an X server and run X apps on OSX? At the end of the day what I want is choice in my OS and I can't get that with Windows and OSX because they lock me into using my computer in a particular manner. They force the GUI style on me, they tell me where things should be and just generally take the approach of knowing better than me how they should run. They don't.

It's so much more portable.

I don't have a clue what you mean by this? If you mean things can be ported to it easily that called source code plus a c compiler. It is nothing particularly clever.

Someone even got PDP-11 emulation working.

You can do that on MS-DOS.