machinehead

When choosing between a desktop and a laptop, based on my personal past experiences my desktops seem to last a lot longer than my laptops. The max life span of a laptop I ever got out was 2-3 years. Most of them died or died, fixed and died again. Texas instruments (my first ever P133), Acer, Compaq, Apple, IBM, Dell. No laptop fared too far different from each other although some better than others. In terms of performance, after each year, most softwares (especially games) have more demanding system requirements. Not to mention the new release of windows which appears more sluggish than the last. In contrast, the lifespan of desktops seem to last a whole lot longer, the max so far is 10 years and still counting for my Intel PII 333mhz which I plan on retiring this year. My workstations are a AMD XP 2000+ 1.7 ghz (3 years old) and an Intel PIII 667 (6 years old) and both are still going strong. So far, I've mostly built my own machines rather than relying on production line models...

Decsions may come naturally to gamers. Dark or light side depending on what force powers you want. In reality, decisions are based on shades of gray and most people's unwillingness to change. The self inflicted predicament of humanity. If anything marketing has taught us. Ideals, dreams and aspirations can be purchased with cold hard cash. And if you are determined enough, you can also buy the more expensive model. Personally, how would you choose between a black hole society and vast area of nothingness. I would imagine both attibute to the same bland side of the coin without anything to offer on the other side. As you can imagine, I'm listening to Morrissey now. Alas, today is a happy happy day.

Oddly enough, I've thought about who would want to get high end AGP cards when motherboards these days are all PCI-E 16x. Well today I answered my own question. I picked up the Gecube AGP 8x Radeon X1300 (from Radeon 8500) for my Socket A AMD 2000+ (1.7 ghz) as well as the Antec Sonata II "Quiet" case to solve some heat and Vista compatibility issues to future proof this machine. Vista didn't like the Radeon 8500 for all its fancy OS X and X11 copied GUI. The case was quite impressive and came with a heffy great 450W power supply (upgrade from a 230W power supply) to power the AGP graphics card, but didn't seem to take the temperature of mainboard according the sis sandra who reported that temperature should be below 50 degrees. I'm guessing farenheit. I feel better that my drives are not next to the power supply now, but it still looks like a bigger CPU cooler is in order if I want to run this as a media PC in the future. How much is too much?

When I was in uni, I had issues with object orientated languages. Mostly because of my prior procedural training in COBOL and C. Hence Java was a pain. The hardest part of OO was having to deliberately erase what you already know about procedural languages. Thankfully, my occupation only required system administration skills. After downloading and installing the Eclipse IDE, I decided to give OO another shot. Thanks to time, I've totally forgotten how to code hence its almost like starting fresh. Believe it or not, it all makes sense to me now, also being able to see the benefit not only from a programming persepective, but also from a business and process point of view. If anyone had issues with configuration management for application maintenance, extracting classes and objects can potentially define your configuration items (CI). Of course the granularity can be determined on how far up or down the hierachy you want to go. So in esscence, the terminology and approaches aren'...