Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

I was a naughty boy and nabbed a torrent of one of the pre-hacked Leopard installers for generic PC kit — getting the shits with Windows, figured it wouldn’t hurt (much) to at least try turning this laptop into a Hackintosh.

I was a stupid boy and didn’t immediately delete the thing when it turned out to be a self-extracting RAR archive. Which did indeed contain what it was supposed to contain, but also contained a trojan that the combination of Windows Defender, Adaware, and AVG couldn’t completely remove. Defender did at least notice it and tell me about it within a minute of extracting the ISO image, but that’s about as good as it got.

Knowing that I pretty much have to nuke the Windows install, I’ve decided to give Linux one more chance. If I can get the audio working adequately, can find some way to make iTunes work well enough to manage my AppleTV, and run Warcrack in a reasonable-enough fashion, I will refrain from blowing AU$3k on that shiny new iMac. For now. I do still rather want one, but if I can limp along until the next generation comes out, then that’s probably a good idea.

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Tags: idiot by matt
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(a) Nobody seems to make an affordable SATA-to-USB2/Firewire disk enclosure that does more than two disks;

(b) So the best you can do at the “I am not spending stupid amounts of money” end of the spectrum is mirrored disk, which is kinda wasteful — I’d rather buy three disks and get the capacity of two than buy two and get the capacity of one;

(c) OS X doesn’t appear to do software RAID5 at all, so even if I bought a couple of two-disk JBOD enclosures it wouldn’t help (and ZFS is still a year or more away!). This is particularly stupid given the number of disks a Mac Pro can take;

(d) For bonus points, my usual suspects at least don’t seem to stock any SATA-to-Firewire boxes, it’s all USB2/eSATA now. They do have some PATA-to-Firewire units but that’s pretty useless unless you’re recycling old drives;

(e) Not having a lot of luck figuring out when to expect Nehalem chips to hit the market. Am horribly tempted by a new iMac but with Nehalem possibly ~6 months away that seems like a bonehead move right now.

(Don’t talk to me about Linux or Solaris or FreeBSD or whatever. This particular line of irritation comes from having had the bright idea that one could probably just get the storage I want relatively cheaply by tacking it on the back of the above hypothetical iMac.)

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Tags: Mac, Tech by matt
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