Everyone knows, of course, that you can run Windows applications on a Macintosh. When Macs started shipping with Intel processors this became almost a no brainer. Boot Camp is the most obvious way to achieve the “Windows on a Mac” experience, but is a bit of a brute force approach: when you boot your machine, it is either a Macintosh or a Windows based system, not both at the same time.
Being new to the Macintosh, I’m “discovering” things for the first time that are ancient history for most Mac users. That is entirely to be expected. But I must admit I totally mis-diagnosed a mysterious email attachment I received today.
I mentioned in my previous post that I have subscribed to .Mac, Apple’s online service for file sharing, email, and so forth.
One of the neat things .Mac can do is automatically synchronize your Mac’s address book, email, and calendar so that you can access it using a web browser on any computer. I was trying to figure out why my MacBook’s address book entries weren’t showing up in the .Mac web interface, and finally read the little notice on the site saying that synchronization was temporarily down.
I’ve had my Mac for a couple of days now, and I’m having fun with it. Since it’s a laptop, it is often more at hand then my main PC. That, coupled with a somewhat intriguing calendaring and address book application, has convinced me to migrate my email.
27 years ago, I bought an Apple II+. That was my first computer, and I have many fond memories of its 16 kilobyte wonder.
When the Macintosh came out in 1984, I really wanted one. Unfortunately, it was several thousand dollars too expensive, and I had already committed to spending several thousand dollars on a Unix based machine. Years went by: I bought an IBM compatible machine for business related reasons, and eventually ended up working almost exclusively with various types of non-Apple technology. Many Windows+Intel machines have taken their place in my home, and hundreds more have served their role in my place of work.
I mentioned in a previous post here that I picked up some additional hard drives. The 750 GB drive is running happily in an external eSATA-connected enclosure and is providing backup for my machine. The other two drives are sitting on a shelf, and will remain there indefinitely. There is a story behind their banishment from my computer. It isn’t that there is anything particularly wrong with the drives themselves: I’ve finally concluded that my Asus motherboard has crappy RAID/AHCI support.
I have spent the last couple of days repeatedly building and tearing down my machine. First I built a RAID 1 array. Bear in mind that the drives I’m using are good quality Seagate 7200.10 drives: they have full SATA2 support, including Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The drives they displaced were high-end WD Raptor 1500ADFD drives: arguably, the Raptors are better drives, but I had suspicions that WD drives might be behind my problems putting my system into standby mode in Vista. I was wrong.
I bought 1.75 terabytes of potential disk capacity today. That storage comes in the form of three 3.5″ Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 model hard drives. For a few moments I was holding all of that storage in one hand.
…but you can’t fault my persistence. I have managed to break my main PC again. The exact same cause: once again, I decided to try putting my machine in standby after an update. And once again, when the machine came out of standby, it horrendously corrupted my ATI SATA RAID array (of Western Digital Raptor drives). Exactly the same steps, exactly the same results.
There is a sub-class of computer enthusiasts who build extreme gaming rigs. They do crazy things like refrigeration for cooling, and spend thousands of dollars to squeeze an extra 5% of performance out of their computer.
I’ve been working a lot lately, scrambling to catch up with some application programming work. Part of this is a result of being behind the technological curve in terms of the particular programming environment I’m working in (J2EE/WebSphere/Hibernate/Spring). Suffice it to say I’ve been working some overtime.