Why certainly,
click if you wish.
Vleeptron would sincerely like to thank all of you -- Abbas, PatfromCH, Jim, Steve -- for your excellent and valuable advice about what kind of new computer system I should buy.
I also consulted my psycho teenage criminal friends on Undernet IRC and they told me what the hottest laptops and iPhones to steal and shoplift are this year. (Fortunately most of them seem to have moms and dads who keep them out of jail, but certainly aren't happy about it.)
I came THIS CLOSE to putting my $$$$$$$$ down on that sexy ridiculous Maserati monster computer at the top -- it's called the XPS 720 Red Extreme Gamer, and I would have been the envy of every 12-year-old boy in the Universe.
THIS CLOSE.
But I made the Fatal Mistake of dragging a professional computer consultant -- the guys who have been keeping my dying piece-o-crap HP on Life Support for the last 3 years -- into it, and for the most sensible and realistic and practical reasons, he talked me out of the lurid Fantasie Drool Machine from Outer Space Tomorrow, and sold me The Yawn-o-Tronic 7000 (below).
It was like getting ready to climb aboard a Triumph Bonneville 750 Dual-Carburetor motorcycle (the stencil on the front forks said "World's Fastest Production Motorcycle," but I can't swear to that, I only got it up to 105 mph/169 kph one time) and kick the starter -- but buying a Toyota hybrid minivan instead. My heart is broken.
Now I'll be the envy of every real estate, insurance and accounting agency, dentist, and medium-sized Protestant church in North America.
But I'll be able to sleep worry-free at night for the next 5 years.
And my Yawn-o-Tronic has a metric shitload (= 0.883 English shitload) of wholly unecessary Punch and Power for the Weird Things I like to do with my computer. (I like to kill gnats with thermonuclear bombs.)
Actually I'm going to join the Dutch Power Cows and Fold Proteins like nobody's business. I am going to power ON this sucker and never turn it off again. I'm going to get STATS! STATS! Vleeptron Dude is going to become a Mega-Star in Intergalactic Distributed Computing.
And write code. Number Theory stuff mostly, I guess. Maybe take a whack at an odd game. I hate playing computer games, but I love the challenge of inventing and writing them. This is going to be a really super programming development platform. Who sells a LisP package?
Be happy for me. In a mighty struggle between my Inner Sixties Nudist Anarchist Hippie and my Inner Calvinist, Sensible and Responsible have triumphed. For the next five years, I will have no digital regrets or remorse or shame whatsoever.
I wanted to run away to Las Vegas with a big bag of cocaine, a 5-liter bottle of tequila, and Vivika and Tifani the identical twin redheaded freckled cheerleaders ... but I got sensible and acted my age, and will be happily sitting in front of the fireplace with the wife and cats listening to Bing Crosby singing Christmas carols and sipping cocoa instead.
"Of all our regrets,
the coldest and most empty
are of temptations
we have successfully resisted."
-- James Branch Cabell
But when nobody was looking, I shoved a Lot Of Wicked Fun inside my new Yawn-o-Tronic 7000. You just can't tell from the outside. From the outside, it just looks like a computer.
(Actually they're not identical, they're fraternal. Their freckle patterns are different.)
7 comments:
Just remember to run your computer maintenance on a regular basis...defragmenter, scandisk, etc., etc., if you are going to leave it on and running all the time. And if you're going to be away from it for more than a few days, shut it down so your hard drive doesn't spin a groove into itself.
Hmmm well I'll do the best I can. I do shut my sucker down when I'm away for more than a day.
The judge pronounced sentence, and the convicted man just went all to pieces and screamed, "Your Honor, I can't do thirty years in prison!"
The judge's voice was sympathetic and supportive. "You just do as much time as you can, son."
Heh. I didn't think of it sooner, but Darrick is a whiz bang at actually building computers from scratch. Should have had him build you one. SWMBO would have only seen a boring, conservative case on the outside. Inside, it could have had as much as you were willing to spend on it.
Next time.
Me, I've switched to Mac. It just sits on my desk and works.
Thanks Darrick, and I have a long history with and enormous respect for building your own off-the-shelf machines. In different circumstances I might be tempted. But I have work to do and feel I need to focus on the work; I don't want to get sidetracked in re-inventing the wheel and becoming a computer tekkie.
i'd still recommend using ubuntu. you can boinc and do distributing computing as easily as in windows. if you're hesitant, i'd throw in the live cd and give it a test run before installing at least to try and see if you like. it's a gazillion times better than vista.
Thanks!!! At last somebody gives me New Computer advice which
1. I can understand and
2. doesn't SCARE me!
My professional Tek Todd, who talked me out of burning my life's savings on Paris Hilton, and convinced me to marry Ugly Betty instead, actually brought up ubuntu and gave it his Blessing and Approval. He's sooooo conservative, it shocked me that he even used the word.
His company's about ten years old, and I think the main reason it's thriving -- most of its customers are small businesses -- is that they always steer their customers toward the most faithful, proven, reliable hardware and software. My guess is, the feedback which has evolved their philosophy is Number of Customer Phone Shrieks & Wails & Murder Threats per month.
So after The Thing arrives and is up and running in Vista, I will indeed give ubuntu a home, now that you've told me it's BOINC-friendly.
That's always been the problem with OS ... Good and Bad are beside the point. The question is ... which third parties support or recognize your amazing spiffy off-brand futuristic OS? I think it sucks that MS shapes the computer universe just because it's Huge and has a violently aggressive marketing campaign.
But when third parties write cool software, they almost always begin by putting their limited resources (Larry and Rajeev) into a release that runs under the most popular Windows version du jour.
Me and Ugly Betty just don't want to risk being left out in the cold when we want to do something really nifty and way cool.
Monopolies suck. There's a lot wrong with Oxygen, too. I've been trying to breathe much better oxidizing fluids all my life, but those damn Oxygen suppliers just rule the world, and bribe lawmakers with free private jet holidays to Bermuda, and drugs and prostitutes.
I really advise you to give ubuntu a try. it looks very sexy, is user friendly, free of viruses and even works with old machines who do not have as much storage space. since it is linux-based you can even write your own stuff, there are tons and tons of cool software out there. Mark Shuttleworth, the owner of the company that distribues ubuntu was one of the first space tourists a few years ago. ubuntu is not perfect, but which os is ? As abbas has said get yerself a live cd and check it out, you dont have to install it right away, you can even partition your hd and use effing vista and ubuntu at the same time.
I am stuck with xp at the moment but as soon as I found out how to connect my cayman adsl router to my internet provider Swisscom, xp will be gone for good. there will be a few things i will miss like winamp, but hey wtf ?
(just in case you wonder why Shuttleworth has so much money: he used to own an internet security company, the company he now owns distributes ubuntu for free, but companies who switch to ubuntu will be charged when it comes to it support.
clever bastard.
spread the word about ubuntu. MS must be destroyed :)
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