teh max0r witnessing - Have you heard the Good News?

Neighbor across the street had asked me a couple of days ago if I'd seen the commercials on television with the Mac & PC guy. I told him that yes, I was familiar with them. He then asked me if they were true.

I told him they were.

And its not really my word that carries the weight, its how I came to that conclusion. You see, drax0r had up and bought himself a mac mini way back around 2004 or so, and I mocked him mercilessly, day and night, for months. When he upgraded to a dual-proc G5 tower, he graciously offered me his mini. I laughed in his face. As a unix adminstrator, I knew XP had its flaws, but they were flaws I knew. My XP machine was a fast, healthy machine. Daily it was set to run full virus scans, ad-ware scans, defrag, and updates. All non-essential services were turned off, and sure it locked up when applications wrote to reserved memory areas, etc - but that what computers do, right?

I finally agreed to 'test' it. I played with it for weeks on end, learning its foreign GUI, playing with its FreeBSD-based back-end. This was a unix administrators dream! At the end of a month or so, I hugged him fiercely, thanked him for freeing me, and powered off the XP box. I took my new mini, attached a 7200 rpm 8MB/cache firewire drive as a boot device and built the O/S from scratch. He'd already maxed out the RAM, so all that was left to do was overclock the CPU. Sure its a little dated now, but I have no reason to use anything else. And when the time comes to finally let it go, I'll purchase another one with the Intel duo-core and bequeath this one to my son.

I don't run virus scans these days, or ad-ware scans. Journaled filesystems means never having to defrag. The object database filesystem that they didn't quite get working in Vista is alive and well on my mac, and I'll never go back. I never considered myself one of those odd 'mac people' but knowing what I now know, I pity Windows users.

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And now, a w0rd to galinda822: Sorry I missed your AIM, the neighbors were downstairs in the basement during my tutorial (I think they're going to get a mac). Also, I picked up two boxes of tea for us, The 'Wild Berry Zinger' and 'Madagascar Vanilla Red Roobios' both Celestial Seasonings.