It appears that, despite the hype, laptops have not fully taken over yet. Good, that means I won’t be obliged to feel embarrassed if I ever decide I need to fix my old desktop machine, which I’m pretty sure just needs a new power supply.
Strangely enough, I’ve been considering doing just that recently. It takes a long time to compile Project Badger on this MacBook Pro… a quad-core desktop machine could cut that in half, easily. But that would mean a new motherboard, CPU, memory, and at least one new hard drive, as well as the new power supply… nah, it’s just not worth it.
Yet. 🙂
I got a quad core system from Gateway (SX2800-001) for $450… B&H sells them.
It’s a small system, but it’s expandable enough, and has actually other than the integrated gma x4500 graphics which can be upgraded with a low-wattage low-profile card, very nice specs. With a graphics card, preferably nvidia, you can even run OS X on it!
Sounds nice, but that’s still not worth it to me, for now.
Desktop vs. laptop? Neither, I say. Netbooks are going to quietly come up the side and then CONQUER ALL!! MWA HA HA HAA!!!
Um… have you taken your medications today, c-square? 😉
Netbooks are overrated, I’m selling mine. Too wimpy to do the things my smartphone can’t do, too big to be as portable as a smartphone. Though running OS X on it made it a good conversation-piece. 🙂
I’m using mine as an SSH server, for times when I’m on an untrusted connection such as a hotel wireless network. Its extremely low power draw makes it a perfect always-on machine for something like that.
A Mac mini has an even lower power-draw than most netbooks, but that’s a bit more expensive. 😉
It also requires an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and likely other things as well. All of those take up desk space and power too. If you use a wireless network, a netbook needs only its power cord. ‘Fraid the netbook wins that one hands-down. 🙂
Maybe a little more desk-space, but what do you think that screen is in a netbook, it’s not a monitor? The keyboard and trackpad, they’re not a keyboard and mouse? 😉
Besides, you could run a Mac mini as a headless server if that’s a problem. (You’ll need the mouse and keyboard plugged in tho, or OS X will complain.)
Also, Mac minis come with a wireless adaptor, so that’s not an issue.
You misunderstand my intent — the external monitor, keyboard, and mouse all take up desk space, cost money, and generally have even more cables. The netbook’s built-in ones are entirely covered by the cost of the netbook itself, and require no cables or additional desk space.
The Mac mini may be very nice, but for some applications (like mine), a netbook is just plain better.
Well, as far as the actual cost of the machine goes, I can’t argue with that. 🙂 Setting up OS X as an ssh server though is probably as simple as a check-box, in some situations (not yours) that would make sense. Plus there is something cool about a Mac mini server, a netbook server is just cheap. And we all know it’s worth paying several times the price for coolness, right? 😉
Sorry, but an SSH server within my network needs to be ultra-secure. You of all people should know there are systems prowling the Internet, looking for insecure SSH servers to attack — one of your systems was compromised by one. I don’t trust OS X’s security for that sort of thing. Or, for that matter, any system that can be set up with nothing more than a check-box.
As for “cool,” I’m a geek. “Cool” only relates to the physical temperature of something; any other definition is completely foreign to me. 😉 And I don’t know what part of my widely-varied cultural ancestry is responsible for it, but I consider cheap a compliment.
I was being sarcastic, I’m a bit rebelling by not considering cheap to be a compliment I guess. My mother is very thrifty, she even used powdered milk rather than buying it in a carton, and set the thermostat in the winter so cold that we had to wear sweaters indoors. She did this even though her husband was a lawyer. Of course, actually, my computer now is the cheapest pre-built core2quad on the market, and my Mac (RIP) was the cheapest Mac on the market, so I guess I’m not too much of a spend-thrift…
OS X uses OpenSSH for it’s SSH server, it’s basically as secure as OpenSSH is on most Unix systems. Despite the check-box. Though Apple is a bit tardy at security-upgrades for it’s open source software sometimes, I must admit.
It was the check-box comment I was arguing against, not the OpenSSH part. If all you have to do is check a box, then whatever you’re installing with it won’t be very secure. SSH security requires a little more work than that.
Well, you can do more than doing the check box to activate the daemon, but then you’ll need to do some configuring. I don’t know about OS X Server, but regular OS X needs you to do command-line stuff to do things like use a public key system rather than a password for SSH, and other security measures. So yeah, it’s not really safe as a turn-key system, but I don’t know of any Unix OS that is really, including OpenBSD. (Note I said “Unix”, there are a few industrial-strength operating systems for non-PCs that are pretty secure even out of the box, but they’re not user friendly either.)
I think we’re in violent agreement: an SSH server needs some configuration to be secure. 🙂