Busy, Like A Bee...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
Oh, taxes. Joy of joys!
Oh, the flu. My favorite thing!
Oh, MusikMesse! Can we get a minimum of one new plug-in format per major trade show, please?
Oh, 64-bit updates! Saved the hardest for last, apparently!
Oh, making a vinyl record. My credit card statement looks like it was beat with a motorcycle lock.
This has been a fun seven days. Very eventful. Guess I got a new iPad in there somewhere. It’s just like the last one only morso. Also, I built, and then summarily hated, a Hackintosh. If I never see another computer again, in any form factor or platform, it’ll be too soon. Adam is going on vacation next week. I’m wondering if I’ll fit in his luggage.
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But apart from that, I take it everything is going just fine?
What did you hate about the Hackintosh? I've been considering going that route.
Mainly the fact that it's generally stupid. I imagine it's fine for people that don't have a life or anything, but the amount of time I want to spend dicking with things that only work halfway is... low.
-CR
That's my impression from what I've seen too. It's like running linux except moreso because linux at least nominally wants to run on all sorts of hardware. You have to spend a lot of time tricking OS X or using semi-developed drivers and generally messing with stuff to get it stable. It doesn't seem worth the effort.
i've been running one for about 3 years.
The good: You can build yourself a quad core beastie at 2.6GHz with decent RAM for about 1/4 of a Mac Pro's price
The bad: Upgrades (especially major like 10.5 to 10.6) are a Nordic Saga - seriously. be prepared to spend 3+ days and have a backup machine to research why your particular combo won't work. with some prep you can whittle the time down but it's never been entirely straightforward, and i'm a pretty fair hand at everything except heavy Terminal based Unix-y stuff.
anyone still interested? i can point you to good resources to lessen the pain, or at least let you know how deep the water is.
Pretty much what he said. My Mac, for business reasons, needs to be bleeding edge as far as OS X goes. I can't put everything on hold every time there's an update just to figure out how the fuck _to_ update.
I will say that the initial install was pretty painless. I built one of the Kakewalk machines (the "pro" build) with some minor changes. But once I got most of my apps installed and started working, I started having serious stability issues, and if there's one thing that is gonna send me around the bend in short order, it is trying to track down stability problems in something that is already balanced on a knife edge.
I knew I was gonna have issues when it was a relief to boot that same machine in to Win7. That should tell you all you need to know.
-CR
I'm actually on my way back to Macville. Never thought I'd even visit there again but my work nearly requires it. The PCIe and Drives will be hooked in via Thunderbolt. And it'll be all "Daddy, what's a desktop?"
yep. been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. i don't go for any patched kernel builds. i use vanilla based options, and selecting the right hardware in advance is paramount to smoothing your path (though of course no guarantee).
on my last upgrade i got it working pretty well but had occasional (every 2-3 days) kernel panics as result of the wrong on-board Ethernet driver. in the 10.5 version of it i actually had to use a USB/Ethernet adapter but they updated it to support the onboard chipset and i used a buggy version until i realized my mistake.
everything's rock solid now, but no onboard audio or sleep available (typical for Hackintosh builds, though these issues are getting to be less common as well).
I took the Hac jump a year and a half ago--just couldn't convince myself to shell out three times the money for essentially the same computer in a shiny aluminum case. Maybe I just got lucky, but it's been more trouble-free than the G5 it replaced. I agree, the right hardware choices--mainly mobo and graphics--are key (I spent an insane amount of time lurking on InsanelyMac before buying), and Kakewalk worked just as advertised.
I do still experience some dread whenever I hit "go" on a combo update, but so far I've been able to hold on the semblance of a life that I had previously...
the last interesting issue i had was updating to 10.6.4 (for Protools 9) - apparently USB drivers were incompatible, so no mouse or keyboard until you roll back the USB drivers kext files to the earlier version. funtimez!
I got the flu for the first time in 14 years late last week. God how I had forgotten the misery that was. Hope you're over it quickly.
Let's see...
Still working on my taxes, but nearly done. On one hand I could complain about having to do the paperwork and talk to the CPAs about AD's taxes, which CR doesn't have to do, but OTOH he does tech support.
Haven't had the flu lately, thank goodness. Being a hermit has its upsides.
MusikMesse: what he said. I've tried to look at the news about Reason with a clear and rational head, but it's pretty damn hard to do that when I'm still in the last few miles of the 64-bit deathmarch. However, if any of you would like to thank me by buying me one of those new Neve summing mixers, it would bolster my morale dramatically.
64-bit updates: what he said. Tattoo is getting all feisty on us in its x64 guise. Ronin, too. I really wanted to be done with that sisyphean undertaking before my vacation, but it doesn't look like I'm gonna make it.
Making a vinyl record: that's entirely his insanity. It's nice to have hobbies, I guess.
I don't have a new iPad but I do have a new computer--a 17" HP laptop. The PC I bought two years ago (back when we first started thinking about the x64 madness) developed a bad case of random BSODs about a year ago. I finally gave up on it after exhausting every troubleshooting measure I could think of or google. I'm trying the experiment of replacing my usual tower-configuration PC with a big laptop, with the notion that I no longer really need a big box for most of what I use my main PC for--which is all the usual main-computer stuff plus AD R&D, and I can use a USB audio interface for the latter. I've still got a big PC stuffed with UAD cards for making music; sadly it doesn't seem to get used much these days.
Anyway, yeah, I get a break next week, so I can't complain.
--Adam
I had a pretty workable Hackintosh system for a while; I could even get my system to shutdown/restart properly and had relatively stable audio performance. That is until I made the unfortunate mistake of updating from 10.6.3 to 10.6.4, rendering my system unbootable. I tried updating the boot-loader and then swapping out/adding kernel modules, etc - all to no avail. After a while I lost patience and decided to just install Windows 7, since I got a free copy from my school.
In any event, I have a first-gen MacbookPro which allows me to continue my beloved SuperCollider/Emacs relationship - although Macbook is definitely showing its age at this point (has really bad fan noise, battery doesn't hold a charge, very little RAM by today's standards and the hinge on the display won't stay in place, not to mention some nasty dents and other wear which it has accumulated over the years).
When I was younger I used to love to dick around with computers and parts. I actually had/have 4 different semi-Hackintoshes running OS 8 and 9 made from clone motherboards, and used Pro Tools cards in them. I have a Linux MintPPC G5 for when I want to tweak, but mostly that time has passed. .
When I needed a new Mac last year to step up from that G5 I just bought a slightly older one. I thought about the Hack option, but decided I just don't have the heart for it anymore, and would give up a little finger rather than pore over internet message boards and try and figure why shit don't work. That time are not free.
bb
sheesh. all you kids are too young to remember that just owning a Mac in itself was hit-and-miss.
Like: Any Mac that started with a "7" had serious motherboard issues (e.g. Quadra 700, PowerPC 7100...)... or certain OS8 updates would create different flavors of hell, depending once again on which hardware series you had. I see all of those same issues resurfacing around me by y'all, but by the hackintoshers' own handiwork.
Soooo glad Apple went to basically one type of motherboard config (I'm oversimplifying here in that description). I am one who pays the extra money with the expectation that "shit's gotta work, I paid for it to do so."
... and so glad about the one-size-fits-all OS / OS Updates, where before Mac updates were model-specific.
just booted my spare ubuntu netbook after a year, and mother of shit, i don't miss all that fannying around. i no longer find that command line stuff fun now i have a lady
:#
@robbster: Props dude, you are an old school Machead for sure.
IMO the "Apple Tax" is worth it. You get the OS for free, no bullshit OS registration like w/ M$ and you get a badass piece of hardware to boot. My Macbook Air is the nicest computer I've ever owned and I've owned a shit-ton of em.
I'm also amazed at what a sorry state of affairs Linux on the desktop still is in 2012. I threw Linux Mint 11 on an IBM Thinkpad recently and sometimes letters for the freakin system font don't display in their entirety (like Klingon or something). WTF? Back in 1999, Linux on the desktop was gonna be a legit player in 2 years or less!
The story of Linux on the desktop is, as usual, the story of too many cooks in the kitchen. Windows and OS X are benevolent (mostly) dictatorships, while Linux is democracy.
-CR
Kind of strange how theres no good OS
Hate Windows
Strongly dislike MacOS
Linux is nice in theory-not fun to find yourself on some obscure forum way past midnight trying to figure out.. ?
Fucking computers-
They're supposed to amplify our abilities but its all a house of cards
There was BeOS. It was fantastic. Then they killed it. Probably because it was fantastic. The competition couldn't have it laying around making them look bad.
-William
Yeah. I was a rabid BeOS user. There was about a 6-month period where it was my sole operating system. Then it died a sudden death.
-CR
BeOS died because the head-hancho Jean-Louie whatever-his-name-was was a greedy, clueless idiot. He woulda fit right in on the show Shark Tank with all these broke dumbasses who believe (in their own delusion) they are million-dollar companies but haven't made jack squat in real revenue.
BeOS shoulda been great and shoulda been the anti-M$ Intel OS that all the cool artistic types like us use, but was killed and buried by the buffoons who owned the IP.
Linux is pretty decent on the "getting the paperwork" done side of things, which is what I'm on right now for my home-base computer.
But for audio or whatever, no. Don't have the patience to ever deal with that again.
Linux is great as a server, but not for creatives. I'm alarmed that Mac OS is starting to sandbox everything. Windows isn't too bad. Once you actually launch your host and get to work it doesn't really matter which OS you're on. I use one of each pretty seamlessly.
I worked at the tradeshow at which Be announced that they were switching their focus to set-top boxes. I felt sorry for the reps who were running around breaking the news; it might've been easier for them to run around announcing that they had some particular sort of STD. The end result was pretty much the same: anyone who was in bed with Be jumped out as quickly as possible. It annoyed me a bit to think about how much money the company I was working for had just wasted on the BeOS port of their product, but then it wasn't my company.
CR used to extoll the virtues of BeOS to me on a fairly regular basis, but he finally seems to have given up in the face of my total indifference. I don't particularly have an OS preference any longer--I run what I need to run in order to get done what I need to get done.
Seems to me that the most sensible approach to running OSX on non-Apple hardware would be for someone to take ownership of keeping OSX running under VMware Player, the free version of their virtualization software. Yes, you'd take a bit of a performance hit, but in exchange you get a uniform platform which would drastically reduce the potential number of driver issues and tweaks that need to be dealt with every time Apple updates the OS.
--Adam
It's funny. We actually advertised (and by "we" in this time-frame I'm referring to Positron Records) on several Be-related sites, and in that podcast that one dude named Scott who's last name escapes me did. I was a 1st-order evangelist.
When they dropped that notice, the entire scene died virtually overnight. Steinberg's announcement was like the next day: "uh, yeah, we're not going to be continuing this Nuendo port, because who gives a fuck any more?" (Albeit in a somewhat more Teutonic fashion. I paraphrase.) I did, immediately prior to that, actually witness, in person, Nuendo running on a Be-Box. It was a sad day all around. Such a great media OS. The VST SDK actually had BeOS stuff in it for several years after Be went under. I even attempted a port of FuzzPlus (the original one) to BeOS.
But anyhow, after that, I ceased giving a fuck about who used what for which. I have two concerns, in general:
1. Is it the right tool for the job? e.g. I prefer 3D Studio Max to Maya. 3D Studio Max is Windows only. Hence, if I need to make 3D things, I need to use Windows. The right tool for that job.
2. Is it going to come between me and my workflow? It takes me a good 2 hours to get in my truly creative zone, where I can actually _accomplish_ the things I need to do to do my job. If, once I've reached that zone, I have to stop for 20 minutes while OS X attempts to re-open a whole pile of top-line apps after a crash, I'm going to get angry, and then I'm going to lose my zone, and it'll take me another 2 hours to get back. So four hours down the drain. Come between me and my zone at your fucking peril, operating system.
Other than that, the size of the shit I could give about which OS is running at any given moment is nearly immeasurable.
-CR
I been using Apple pretty exclusively since 1982... I'm not a Kool-Aid drinker, but for those of us who run 'em hard all the time... sometimes some voodoo is involved. I remember when I was in a recording engineering program in school... (2000)... and the Digital Media Lab had 2 x iMacs with 32 MB of RAM and a single G4 with 128 MB of RAM. Dog shit by today's standards... and of course, when overloading them, on some days they acted funny .. so us students built a shrine to them... to appease the Gods.
And then - one day, while 3 of us were working - a supervisor came in, saw the shrine, and thought we were being smug lil' shits. They tore down the shrine and within 2 minutes - I shit you not - all 3 cpus crashed....
I use Macs cos there have been times they have pulled out some Beam-Me-Up-Scotty shit when they really should not have been able to.... but, on the other hand, there is definitely some voodoo shit behind it. No question.
CR, you ever own a motorcycle?
Briefly. I'm not allowed to have one now. Which is for the better, honestly.
-CR
I still have boxed versions of BeOS and the office suite sitting on the shelf. I think part of me is still waiting for it to come back.
Doesn't RADAR still run BeOS?
Speaking of magic:
http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
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