Yannblog

Well, if you look at the Mac Mini, the price parity breaks down. The features may be slightly less on it as far as wireless and maybe a little processor speed, but a Dell Inspiron 530 esktop can be had for $450 or so that blows away the Mac Mini in terms of hard disk storage (with room for a full 250GB drive) and other such fun. Granted, the Mac Mini is smaller, but thanks to desktop components the Dell eats the mini’s lunch from a price-performance perspective. Oh, and the Dell comes with a keyboard and mouse…what an ingenious thought! And the mouse actually is not a pain to use, as the Apple Mighty Mouse is…I went out and bought a Logitech optical mouse ecause I could not stand to use the Mighty Mouse on my iMac…ech…

Also, if you don’t mind having a regular desktop as opposed to the all-in-one-ness of the iMac, Dell can offer you for $1300 basically everything the $1500 iMac gets you. Except the webcam and slightly better graphics.

When it comes to the Mac Pro vs. Dell’s hot-rod XPS system, granted the Mac Pro is aimed at a bit different audience, but the ell config versus the Mac Pro leaves me calling “skunk rule” With a faster, single-die quad core proc, faster memory…well yu get my drift…at nearly $1000 less than the Apple model…well, you decide. And if you need more speed, Dell’s overclocked 3.33GHz upgrade is precisely $52 more than an upgrade to a mere 3 GHz on the Apple platform. Sure, you can run octo-core on the Mac Pro, but that’ll run you another $700 and the performance increase ain’t gonna help ya until years down the road. Same on the eight memory slots…whacha gonna do with ’em?

And if you really need all that, looks like Dell’s Precision workstations come out to a few hundred chraper than the Mac Pro. Sorta like a “back atcha” for the macbooks…

…interstingly, the Dell 17″ workstation comes out to $200 more than the Macbook Pro similarly configured, but then again the workstation is probably better-built (!) and sports a workstation-class graphis card. If you want a gaming machine, Dell’s XPS laptops will deliver the goods, albeit thick-ly.

Just comparing things between Apple and Dell, and on some things Apple is unnervingly similar (Dell please clean up thy act) but again in may cases Dell pulls a “skunk rule” on Apple with performance to price…

Please read the whole post before pointing out discrepancies in my comparison. I will ost them myself.

So anyway I decided to peruse the Dell website today, and found to my surprise that the XPS M1330 laptop they had started at $1099 price-wise. Same as the Apple Macbook…so I decided to do a price comparison.

Well, first I found out that I couldn’t get the lowest-end options on feature parity with each other. So I upped to the Apple 2.2GHz white model of the Macbook, which was $1299…and found to my horror that a similarly configured Dell M1330 cost $50 more than the Macbook! I’m talking same graphics, same processor, same memory, same hard disk, same DVD burner, same (non-Intel) draft-N wireless card (well, Dell is Dell branded, Macbook is Atheros), same 6-cell battery (okay, 56 WHr for Dell, 55 for Apple)…and the Dell is $1349!  What the heck?!?

Now in fairness, the Dell laptop is MUCH more configurable than the Macbook, the Dell has more ports, the Dell has an ExpressCard slot, a better webcam and Vista Home Premium, but then again the Macbook is thinner overall than the Dell and with iLife ’08 and OS X Leopard you might as well have Vista Home Premium on the Macbook, and maybe then some depending on who you’re talking to. !?!

But on further inspection, the Dell comes with some extra goodies: one year of LoJack laptop protection and 15 months of Trend Micro Internet Security. You also get 10 GB of online backup storeage for a year with the Dell unit. Discounting antivirus since you don’t need that on Mac quite yet and because you can get it for free on PC relatively easily, you have $50 worth of value from the LoJack…the price difference between the two laptops. The 10GB of storage is what Apple provides with their $100-a-year (or $70 if you buy it with a Mac last time I looked closely…may have changed)  .Mac service. Make of that what you will.

So technically EXACTLY the same configuration on a Mac would be the same or more than the Dell, but the Dell makes you take LoJack which I personally have no use for…neither of my laptops have walked off and I’ve had my Dell for over a year now…interesting, no? Also, there’s an audience difference here: the Dell is relatively a higher-end machine than the Apple, hence expansion capabilities, likely similar or even better build quality, etc…but it’s still a bit on an eye-opener to see that Apple is this close to price parity with similarly-equipped PCs. Now let me see if this happens with any other PC system…scary huh?

First off, I wish I could put in my “about me” section that I’m a lover of Deus, Digg and Dr. Pepper…but I haven’t been to Digg in the past few months. Silly, un-geeky me.

Anyhow, a quick, low-key vent: I’m not happy with how I’m doing in Physics 100. Then again, I actually completed more than 85% of the homework assignment this time around. A good thing no doubt. Now if I can score well on the exam the day after tomorrow I’m set.

But what about Bass Hunter? Well, generally I’m not big on techno, nor do I endorse explicit lyrics, no matter how obfuscated by pulsating rhythms, however I have to pass on a recommendation from the TWiT podcast Net@Nite: Bass Hunter. If you’re cheap and don’t want to pay for their music, just searh for them on YouTube to get a sampling of their work. Good stuff, though honestly the two dongs p there make the band out to be more repetitious and they really are. To get a feel for the band grab their album LOL…I downloaded it from Yahoo earlier tonight and it’s fun. I was genuinely surprised when none of my suite mates checked in with me after my playing, with intentional obnoxious-ness, the whole sixteen-song album at pretty much full volume on my iMac running Yahoo Jukebox through Parallels (too much information I kn0w). But anyhow I digress…you should really take a look at their stuff…it’s pretty fun. And very Swedish.

Hmm, that’s it. I don’t think I’ll post tomorrow proper as I will be working on various pieces of homework, so consider yourself warned if nothing shows up here for observed Veterans’ Day (which I forgot about because my school takes practically nothing off holiday-wise). Then again something may appear…

Just a quick tribute to all fighters for freedom (however portrayed as misguided, or actually misguided, or what have you) across America, past and present, particularly past. Seeing as how today is Veterans’ Day and I’d be amiss not to acknowledge it. Hmm, I think I was laying in bed at 11:11:11 though this morning, the 89th anniversary of the signing of the Armistace that ended World War I…

Okay, if you want to be picky I had just gone to bed. Seeing as how 11:11:11 would be measured in GMT +1 or something like that. But I digress…back to a salutation to all those veterans out there.

Okay, maybe I should be called out on eating too many candy bars and thus noticing this but just recently (VERY recently; less-used candy bars around my school campus still bear the older moniker) “King Size” has been replaced with “Large Size” on candy wrappers with no other difference in…um…anything. Wonder whether it was a political group or a feminist group (the latter I suppose…with a good bit of the former mixed in) that wanted to sue Hershey & Co. over this one.

Personally, “king size” has a nice ring to it that “large size” just can’t match. They should have made the candy bar size “XL Size” or “Extra Large” or something like that, something a little more catchy than “large size”. I mean, come on…

…which brings me to another thing…what are they gonna do about mattress sizes? Anything going to have to change there? I’m serious, folks…if that happened insanity and chaos would ensue…

Well, I’m writing about chemistry…sorta…when I should be writing down answers to chemistry problems. Ah well…

So you have the Second Law of Thermodynamics, right? It says that for every change in matter and energy, the entropy of the universe must incrtease. Meaning that the number of “microstates” available increases. You could call this randomness, bt it’s simply a measure of how many possibilities there are. You could call it decay too…in this context most people do…

Which brings up an interesting point. Don’t we see this in society? For every action man takes, somehow, somewhere something is fractionated. There are more possibilities, but this leads to societal decay from pretty much any viewpoint. One part of society may become more ordered, but for the rest of society things disintegrate more overall. Not a good thing, though of course it leads to lots of “possibilities”…

So, looking at things from a Crationist philosophical point of view (yeah I know you’re gonna stop reading right here) you have an explanation for why things haven’t quickly decayed to maximum possibility, maximum randomness, maximum decay: intervention by a Deity every few thousand years, imparting first destructive (flood) then socially constructive (incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection) energies into the universal system to reduce the number of possibilities by first destruction of unfavorable outcomes, then by unification of many outcomes into one. Therefore by an external force, for which the universe cannot account (because God is not becoming more decayed, random or microstate-filled due to principles of being outside of time etc.), imparted a “boost” to the universe so that it wouldn’t descend into complete and utter chaos, as manifested by multiplicities of possibilities, nearly all of which would be destructive and lead to the decimation, and ultimate destruction, of all creation into cold, dark, dead matter.

Which begs the conclusion that we may well be ripe for another input of energy (second coming or whatnot) or that, by extrapolation, it may be a millenium and then some away. Again, this is extrapolation so I am by no means predicting that the end ofthe world is nigh, but just throwing something out there…

Well, thanks for trying to follow the above. If you got confused, that’s fine. I just wrote this in maybe ten minutes though I’ve ben thinking about the whole idea for the past few days. Tell me what you think…

Well, as I wait for an extra-large batch of clothing to wash, and dry, and dry again (yay campus dryers) I’ve decided to finally breathe life back into this blog. Hopefully I’ll be posting to it every day, at least once per day, starting tomorrow proper (I consider days started at 6 am due to my late night schedules :D).

Anyhow, look for a mix of tech bits, personal life info and philosophical bits, all here and all categorized so that you don’t have to sort through one to get to the other.

More coming soon, but first I’m going to update the other site pages and take a shower…