[rescue] Re: Re: Re[2]: Speaking of Solaris GUI options...

[Robert Novak]

On Sat, 8 Feb 2003, Kurt Huhn wrote:

> Robert Novak <rnovak at indyramp.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I found a G3 266 with 256mb of ram and Twin Turbo graphics to be quite
> > usable for desktop tasks.... the 500mhz iBook even did Office X and a
> > couple of web browsers pretty well. And I'm far from an Apple
> > apologist. I'd probably still be using my iBook for writing and
> > Internet if it had come with a DVD drive. 
> 
> The Blue and White G3 350 I had with 896 MB of RAM ran OS X like a
> *champ*.  I had no problems with the speed of the system, at all.  It
> even ran Xdarwin and OpenOffice with acceptable speed - something that
> seems to be a favorite targt of speed complaints on a Mac.  All in
> all, I really liked that system int he short amount of time that I had
> it.

That's cool. I did boost mine up to 512MB--it came with that much but I
removed some for installation troubleshooting--and it still ran quite
responsively. If I weren't too lazy to get that rescued Synoptics switch
out of storage, I'd probably have it running now with the 15" Eizo TFT.
Much lighter than my Hitachi 20" tube :)

> Maybe I'm just more patient than a lot of people?

Maybe we just don't publish O'Reilly books on our Macs on a daily basis.
:-)  Or maybe we have a better sense of proportion. I'm told by some
people who work with publishing and such that Illustrator is much more
common anyway. 

I used to put a small commercial newspaper together with Mac 512s using
Pagemaker 1.0 on 400K floppies. The boss's computer had a hard drive...
everyone else had one, or if lucky, two floppy drives. By the time I left
the paper we'd gotten PM3 and a Mac Plus, but the copy that went to press
was still generated on a LaserWriter Plus and waxed onto the layout
sheets. This was about 15 years ago. 

It's an important skill to be able to make the most of what you have. It's
no challenge at all to make a V1280 useful, for example, but (obRescue)
getting a couple of disposed-of SPARCclassics to do useful and voluminous
work is where the fun comes in. Admittedly, it's harder to toss fallacies
around with that setting, and it's easier to say you have to have no less
than a fully stocked E10k to run Postfix, but there's more to life than
overspecifying hardware :)

Rob

-- 
Robert Novak, Indyramp Consulting * rnovak at indyramp.com * indyramp.com/~rnovak
	"I don't want to doubt you, Know everything about you
      I don't want to sit Across the table from you Wishing I could run."