Although I was a regular with PCWorld (marketed and translated as "Mikro - PC World" in Serbia), I stopped reading it after the overall quality of it's contents degraded below my personal threshold. To be more specific, I'm talking about 4 full page marathons dedicated towards projector reviews, almost every issue, 8 page Windows "never before seen" tips that usually tell you how to defragment your hard disk and turn off window animations (alltogether - boring, beginner class mouthwash - repeating itself yearly), and the lack of fresh news that you would usually find on digg. Now, that may be the localized version that I am reading, but I'm sure that the situation is quite similar over in the USA.
Nowadays, I mostly read the online version a few times per month, only to be dissapointed by some oh-not-so-wonderful articles that have an, I must admit, tempting title - "top xx at xxx" (replace missing areas accordingly). I have no clue why titles that number and compair similar products/events like "Top 10 April Fools' Day Joke Web Sites" and "Google's Top 17 Easter Eggs, Gags, and Hoaxes" attract so much attention, but their contents are generally not so fresh or exciting as one might think. Compiled web finds with a few dashes of author's opinion are not so hot anymore, and linking them to the MTV top charts is not helping either... I miss the old days when authors actually gave opinions about products, instead of following the current "trends"and fabricating their articles to the public's liking. One example: Windows XP was first reviewed as a major release that would shake the world, bring new features to PCs and brighten the overall outdated Windows gray screen... The activation feature was said to be "not bad at all", and the speed was far greater than w2k and w98x builds. What happened later? New users complained about w9x software refusing to work with the XP's NT backend, driver nightmares, visual bloat etc... PCWorld was quick to follow, labelling the activation feature as a nag, XP as slow (thus offering the, ever so great and useful, "speed up tips") and advocated that Windows 98 was still a very good choice for todays computing. XP vs Vista today? Very similar... It won't be long after another previous Windows version vs. current Windows version showdown takes place.
As soon as PCWorld starts writing quality stuff again, I'll be ready to read paper again like in the ol' days... Until then, I'll "enjoy" the articles they have now, and the videos that are embedded in their, sad to say, crappy video player.
I've got a "neat" exam in Unix shell commands next week (and it's not the only one too), so I'm kind of obligated to use my Ubuntu Linux or MacOS installation to do the needed exercises... Seeing that Ubuntu refuses to work with TeamSpeak and XMMS together (it's actually TeamSpeak's fault - it grabs the default ALSA sound output and no other app can access it), I had to settle with MacOS. No tunes - no dice. Fortunately, the guys from Cupertino managed to squeeze in the BASH shell, so I'm good to go. It's still very boring to use today's modern GUI OSes to execute huge shell text commands with a few folders and files as an end result.
One of the most complicated tasks I need to do is to manage to use pipes along with regex-based searching, which looks very cryptic and leaves me with a "did I type that?" grin in the end... But hey, it's not as hard as it is boring, so I think I'll manage... Hopefully. (Must... resist... from... watching... retarded... 4'o clock... TV shows...)
I really don't believe that any hardware developers working in major mobile phone companies knew the evil they were creating when they introduced the speakerphone feature on todays mobile phones... First, it was used to amplify the party you are speaking to, but later on, it became an annoyance of great proportions. On Serbia's streets (I'm currently talking about Subotica, but the situation may be, and probably is, very similar), people of all ages are using their mobile phones as mp3 players, which is nice (seeing that buying separate mp3 devices is not compatible with their budget)... except one thing - no headphones. That's right, the "yellers" crank the volume up to the max, create a short playlist, and start their 1km long journey with their cranked up mobile phone playing their favorite tune, creeping along, annoying everybody around them, emitting noise that really isn't music, but simply the static and distortions that the poor magnet emmits in it's creaks of pain and overload... Here's a hint, ya retards: HEADPHONES! That's right, I don't want to listen to YOUR songs, and there's a big bonus for that "no" if you are listening to local folk songs! If your speakerphone is producing any kind of noice, whether it's music or video sound, keep the acoustics inside the privacy of your own home/bathroom/watering hole. While an mp3 file is playing, don't hold the phone in your hand, don't put it in your pocket, don't hang it around your neck - get a freakin' pair of headphones and enjoy your music! (otherwise, you'll just piss people off and gather unwanted attention)
After managing to kill my partition table and render my hard disk useless (only temporarily, thanks to Hiren's Boot CD, Windows Vista's DVD rescue features and the most recent Ubuntu Live CD with GParted installed), I finally managed to install OSX on my leg warmer that I dare to call my PC. Finally!Now, the steps taken to make everything work are not very hard, nor plentiful, but seeing that every PC has it's own soft spot, it can take a while to figure out what's wrong. As for me, here's what I did:
Replaced the installed kexts for "AppleVIAATA" with the ones from the Kalyway Install DVD (fixes the "waiting for root device" problem)
Replaced the installed kexts for "IOATAFamily.kext" and "AppleACPIPlatform.kext" with the ones from the Kalyway Install DVD (fixes a kernel panic and the "using xxxx buffer headers..." lock up, respectively)
Removed all NVidia NVInject or any similar kexts because they killed my soul until I figured out that they were the ones that kept my MacOS from booting. Installed the Punk92 NVidia patch, and everything works fine (native resolution + Quartz extreme).
Used EasyBCD in Windows Vista to setup a triple boot between MacOS X, Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. (be prepared to have loads of rescue CD's in handy before attempting to dual/triple/xxxple boots)
And that's about it. Remember to go from the very bottom - using safe mode with "-x", verbose mode with "-v" (so you can see any error that hits you), "cpus=1" if you are having trouble using your dual core processor or you are experiencing reboots during the boot process and eventually "-s" to see if you can boot in single user mode. Be sure to hit "-f" regularly to make sure all extensions are loaded. Oh, and hanging out on the insanelymac.com forums is a must. You will also find much needed files over there! And to complete the deal, here's a pair of screenshots:
A farewell… For a man who did not know fear, nor did not know when to give up... for a man, a man so great, a man whose footsteps made all evil shiver in fear, whose voice was not just a sound, but a wakeup call, whose smile symbolized the meaning of progress and success, whose back you could never see. You could disagree with him, curse him or frown whenever you saw his face, but you could not close your eyes in front of his magnificent deeds, nor will you ever be able to do so. A farewell – for a man who refuses to leave us be, who gives us inspiration, who gives us strength to go on, even though he is not here with us today… a farewell to him, but not his spirit, the gift of all gifts that we will never cease to carry on with us…
Since I can't run OSX yet on my hackintosh machine, at least I have something to cheer me up until I do - Sheepshaver! I was usually playing around with Basilisk II, installing System 7 and eventually MacOS 8 on it, but Sheepshaver supports MacOS 9 - which means - I get the benefits of using (ehm... emulating) the powerPC architecture! Now that I have installed the "blast from the past" or the "classic environment" - MacOS 9, I can taste that sweet feeling of speed, even on a pittyful 100MHz of simulated processing frequency! How cool is that? One of the biggest arguments of die hard fans for continuing on publishing working applications for the OS9 is the speed that it brought to the table (nevermind the memory protection though ), and the simplicity that, supposedly, today's eye candy takes away. I do have to agree that OS9 lacks good memory protection and all the nice features that newer operating systems have to offer, but still, a great sum of people use their Macs or PCs for day to day office work - aka - nothing special, and OS9 coveres all that with the speed and simplicity only it can brag about. Think of all the Vista users out there that have the Windows classic theme active, I bet there's nothing that can replace that gray 2D environment... If I ever get the chance to fix someone's Mac running OS9, I certainly won't complain about it. Anywhoo, here's how it looks (yeah, yeah... I know - it's a cheesy background, but it still looks nice):
I got a Pentium 4 Dual Core based PC from a friend who needed it fixed up and brought on it's feet. It was a custom built PC - therefore - no OS. Obviously, the BIOS was not so much fun to use, so I proceeded with installing Vista... After a successful boot-up from the installation DVD, I quickly reached the end of the quick "next, next, next" based wizard, and was all set to watch my washing machine do it's thing while Windows was installing.
However, I wouldn't be writing this if something didn't go wrong... It did. Windows setup reported that it couldn't make the partition bootable, so setup was canceled. That was the first time I actually saw that kind of error message... strange... Luckily, a quick reach towards my trusty GParted live CD solved the problem by letting me flag the only partition available as "Boot" (why was it not flagged after I used the built in partitioner in the first place!?). At least I thought the missery was over, but when Windows went on to boot for the first time, it died on me. A black screen - basically nothing there to inform me about what happened. Next step: safe mode - didn't help - the boot process froze when loading crcdisk.sys (hm... a clue? See title...)
To make the long story short, I booted the Vista installation DVD again and used the command prompt to start "chkdsk"... Needless to say, hundreds and hundreds of bad sectors popped up. Oh, goody... How typical is this? I could have saved about 4-5 hours by just using a disk check routeine to diagnose the problem! But, wait, aren't hard disks supposed to be reliable these days? How about S.M.A.R.T.? Nope - no reports about a dying disk. So, while I'm typing this, the LOW level formatting bar is at 95%. Very slowly, it will reach 100% (I hope, gulp), and I won't have to horse around with making Vista work. But, the main rule is - if a hard disk gets any bad sectors, the situation will eventually get worse - allot worse, posing a threat to every piece of data on it, and putting me in jeopardy of having to fix the mess a few months later! The funny thing is, I am now actually hoping to see a few bad sectors so that I can return it as broken... Although, I'm not laughing. Actually, I'm hoping to see some god damn SSDs soon! Why oh why must we have such fragile rapid moving parts inside storage devices...? Oh, and, here's one for Microsoft: I know it's not your fault for the busted hard disk drive, but how 'bout a warning? Something like... Oh, I dunno... "Bad sectors detected", perhaps? Or maybe a blue dot on a red screen... Anything! Just cut the users some slack - no black screens.
Edit: It turns out that the HDD was faulty as a wooden leg caught on fire... I got it replaced fairly quickly, and everything is just peechy. Thanks goes out to Asus for notifying me about the failing HDD even though I have S.M.A.R.T. monitoring turned on... (pause)... NOT!
Although I was a regular with PCWorld (marketed and translated as "Mikro - PC World" in Serbia), I stopped reading it after the overall quality of it's contents degraded below my personal threshold. To be more specific, I'm talking about 4 full page marathons dedicated towards projector reviews, almost every issue, 8 page Windows "never before seen" tips that usually tell you how to defragment your hard disk and turn off window animations (alltogether - boring, beginner class mouthwash - repeating itself yearly), and the lack of fresh news that you would usually find on digg. Now, that may be the localized version that I am reading, but I'm sure that the situation is quite similar over in the USA.
), and the simplicity that, supposedly, today's eye candy takes away. I do have to agree that OS9 lacks good memory protection and all the nice features that newer operating systems have to offer, but still, a great sum of people use their Macs or PCs for day to day office work - aka - nothing special, and OS9 coveres all that with the speed and simplicity only it can brag about. Think of all the Vista users out there that have the Windows classic theme active, I bet there's nothing that can replace that gray 2D environment... If I ever get the chance to fix someone's Mac running OS9, I certainly won't complain about it. Anywhoo, here's how it looks (yeah, yeah... I know - it's a cheesy background, but it still looks nice):
