Which cost a princely sum of ~1400 SGD, and heretofore will (hopefully) serve me well as a desktop replacement overseas, assuming DigiPen doesn’t kick me out on the 2nd day for not completing my summer sketchbook assignment before arriving, which appears to the more likely case at the moment.
And before I am pointed to Newegg for something that would blow the specs of this worthless rig out of the water for about 500 bucks less, could I just point out that I am in Singapore, where computing equipment seems cheap until you realize it’s actually all cardboard being marked up at inexorbitant prices.
In any case, I’m not going to dwell on the vagaries of my new purchase for now; perhaps in a future post, after I get everything settled on it, like a new home.
Instead, I wish to talk about hats.
A long time ago, there was a hat-maker which made decent hats. These hats were comfortable, though not luxurious; they were relatively cheap and above all plain functional in every way. For every minor foible that developed with the hat, the man on the street would find a cunning workaround.
However, one day, another hat-maker suddenly appeared out of nowhere. They made hats which looked wonderful, with the earlier utilitarianism and older conservative styling norms thrown out, going for a minimalist and chic feel.
It caught on immediately, with the general populace swayed by the good looks and the promise of having a hat which wore differently than what they had been accustomed to for years. Even with the murmurs about the hats being slightly less comfortable and somewhat perplexing sometimes in their actual wear design, people loved it.
The first hat-maker didn’t just look at their business being taken away, of course. They started to ask their customers, “What do you even see in those other hats? Would you like us to try and make our hats better, maybe make them more like those other hats?”
And like all good customers, they said yes, and like all good companies, the hat-maker listened, and so they tried to make their hats more like the others, and now, nearing the end of my overly-long metaphor, I’m going to point out that all these hat-makers have managed to achieve is make Aero utterly fucking useless and allow Compiz, a goddamn Linux window manager, to remain essentially undefeated when to comes to having fancy shit on your desktop.
I used to be somewhat neutral about a year ago, when a Macintosh, to me, was just a “commercial UNIX-like distro”. Now, after 2 months at Lucasfilm Animation Singapore and being forced to work with it and Final Cut Pro on a relatively simple project, I’ve changed my mind. The only reason anyone should use a Macintosh now is because they absolutely WILL DIE if they don’t have access to Final Cut Pro, because they’re still in the compositing industry and haven’t switched to Nuke, or because they’re too lazy to learn how to do things right in Windows, or even any of the popular distros out there for Linux. Or, as I strongly suspect, because they just want to look cool.
I’m going to say right now that Windows has a lot of bullshit I’m not happy with. I’m also going to say that the Macintosh operating system on the whole however is complete bullshit in the way it’s marketed as being safer, easier to use and overall more efficient than its rivals.
Let’s start with security. I’m not going to go into the “there are more virii for Windows than there are for Mac” because frankly if you think that argument holds any water of any sort you are scum need to install Noscript on Firefox and stop fooling around with your Facebook apps. I’m not exactly a hacker by any stretch of the imagination, but I managed to get admin access on my uncle’s Macbook (he had guest accounts enabled) and access to his drive within a couple of minutes via a few Terminal commands. You can literally create an admin account from the command line using a guest account. I mean even with Windows you have to fuck around with the registry to reset an admin’s password, and I think these days it has to be done via booting into a Linux kernel and using a registry editor? In any case it’s not like I can just walk by and go, “Oh look I think I want admin access now” and BOOM a few commands and a reboot later I have full root access.
I find security doesn’t stop there, either. There’s so much rubbish going around Apple’s other prides and joys that I really wonder how anyone can claim they’re not as bad as Adobe when it comes to patching vulnerabilities.
But what if security isn’t a major concern? What if, like me, you plan to secure your investment simply by running FF with Noscript and just locking your room door? Would that mean a Mac would be more palatable?
Part I of my Macintosh story concludes here.
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