It always starts with a game...

I have tech envy, I'm intechxicated, hardware makes me hot.

Whatever metaphor you want to use, go for it. It doesn't change the fact that I'm looking at and really thinking hard about another laptop.

And I don't bloody want a Macbook. I'm so angry with Apple for so many reasons (not supporting Pages, going to Intel, giving up firewire, and basically making the dumb decisions that drove me to Win$hit back in the early 90s) that I don't want to drop many hundreds of dollars in their laps. I want a machine that can dual boot into Linux and Win, has a firewire port and card slots, that will run my games and play well with my local network. Macbooks fall down on the firewire port (idiots - they were the firewire advocates until everyone else got around to adopting them) and we have seven or eight firewire devices. Screw USB2.

I have little love of Toshiba, Compaq-HP, Dell, Acer and Sharp, but they have not pissed me off recently.

And it all started with a game. Two of them, actually. Neither new, both M$ only. Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (which is ancient, in terms of games - it came out in the 90s and will run on 8 MB of memory and under Win 3.1) and Neverwinter Nights. I want to develop for the latter, and I can't do that on a Mac.

I looked initially for a rescue cheapie laptop - something that would run the former game and basically be a backup laptop. I hate desktops for a number of reasons, but power consumption is a big one. And then I thought about how slow that would be, and how I'd want this, that, the other thing, and to be able to run those 12 programs that make up about 4% of my annual computing needs that REQUIRE an MS box.

So I've gone and done it. We have gaming machines again.

God help me.

running natively on Apple hardware.

I've been running Linux on Mac hardware as far back as the days of the Mac 7100.

I hate windows. But I can't get away from it. I'm hoping that within a not too large timespan, we can hack OS X apart enough to get it to run on not-Apple (because dammit, I need those 1394 ports).

But Jobs' magpie tendencies have gone too far. Shiny isn't the sole standard for adopting or abandoning a product line, and Intel treats its workers like the spawns of Satan. I just can't bring myself to buy something that's Intel branded. (yes, I know that the pbook upon which I'm typing has intel chips in it, but they're not getting free advertising for their products just for selling them.)

My powerbook will always be my main computer, until it grows green lichen and must be started with an electric shock to the chassis. Like Neal Stephenson, if I have to write documents in TeX and build custom LISP compilers to convert the TeX file into something readable by everyone else, I will (though I prefer .pdf). I love Miranda and Miranda loves me, and we shall not be parted but by death. (Oo. There's some animism....)

We're also disbanding the Hardware Museum. The 9600, the 8400 and Linux server (an old Compaq PIII) are going to be donated (all three run Linux, and there's a local project that builds for places that need internet access and some word processing. They want all three). The cube stays, but only as a server. The ibooks stay, but again, as servers.

I just feel like we're ending a way of life.

had difficulty keeping up with production. Where was the PPC dual core chip for laptops?

For your purposes I am sure that Mac hardware will do all you want to do. It does have one firewire port.

BTW, there is a new version of Scribus that is easy to install. http://www.scribus.net/

Do you run LyX?

You probably already know that though. :hi:

that has just been released.

Wish I had the money for one.

You can, you know.