qemu Re: Reliable laptops around $1k?

Sat Jul 24 11:55:23 PDT 2004

On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 01:18:47PM -0500, Jim Hickstein wrote:
> 
> Personally, I have a G4 TiBook (Mercury) that's now 4 years old and still
> fast enough (barely).  A UNIX machine that can print: revolutionary!  A Mac
> with ifconfig(8): incredible!  I recommend them to anyone, but especially
> geeks, who need ifconfig(8) and all that.  (Earlier I went through a phase
> of dual-booting OS 9 and LinuxPPC on my Wallstreet, the one with travel
> stickers from all over the world.  OS X is better.)

Indeed.  The talk I gave in July was from a 12" Powerbook, which I
bought after eBaying my 15" Titanium Powerbook.  One other nice thing
about Apple notebooks:  resale value.  I paid over $3k when I bought the
15" new the day it came out (and got it just a day before I had to get
on a plane to Arecibo for a month).  When I eBayed it over a year later,
I got $2k for it, and if I wasn't in a hurry to sell, could have gotten
more.

Try that with a Dell. :)

I went with the 12" Aluminum because, while I occasionally miss the
screen real-estate, it's the same speed as the 15" I sold, and the added
portability much more than makes up for it (I've got a Sager upstairs
that has a desktop 3.2GHz P4 in it.  I bought it for gaming.  It's
wonderful for gaming.  It's also an additional 12lbs in my backpack.
Ouch!)

As I told Strata just a week or so ago, I won't go on about the joys of
OS X, because pretty much every *nix geek I know that's picked up a
Powerbook has fallen in various degrees of love with it.  As far as the
*nix crowd goes, they sell themselves.  I knew it was a bona fide
phenomenon when I walked into LISA one year and damned near everyone
attending was sporting not the standard bestickered Vaios and Thinkpads
and Dells running Linux or a BSD of years past, but Powerbooks.  Even
the terminal room was chock full of shiny new Apple desktops, and was
sponsored by Apple.  Of course, I'd already drunk the Kool-Aid by then,
so I wasn't too surprised at the mass conversion.  But I'm sure others
were stuck by it.  It was quite a sight to walk through the halls and
see one glowing Apple after another, each independently purchased by
people generally posessed of Clue.

-- 
Mark C. Langston            GOSSiP Project          Sr. Unix SysAdmin
mark at bitshift.org   http://sufficiently-advanced.net    mark at seti.org
Systems & Network Admin      Distributed               SETI Institute
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