niflheim

So my Macbook Pro has been developing “issues”.  In the midst of some very important work, everything started to run slower until the system was effectively locked up.  Even with a reboot, one could not actually launch applications.

ssh worked, so I was able to copy everything I needed from the machine, but the laptop itself was, in short, hosed.  As it is absolutely vital to work, that posed certain difficulties.

So I drive the hour or so to the nearest Apple Store.  I need service.  They’re it.  What could possibly go wrong?

Glad you asked!  They refuse to talk to me, look at the laptop, or take the laptop from me for later service without an appointment.  I, of course, do not have an appointment.  They, of course, are fresh out of appointments and I will have to come back another day.

Wow.  Just…  Wow.

3 hours of my day gone because I didn’t have one of the precious 15 minute appointments with the Apple Genius who will certainly be unable to determine the problem and will take the laptop from me in order to ship it to someone who can.

If I needed any other reasons to stop using Apple products, and I most assuredly did not need additional reasons to stop using Apple products, this sealed the deal.

Folks at work suggested I call AppleCare directly.  They’ll send me a box/mailer and I won’t have to lose 3 hours of my day hearing about appointments I don’t have.  So, what the heck.  Sounds great to me.

Of course, the laptop is fully functional while I’m on the phone, the hardware tests report no failures while I’m on the phone, the tech won’t simply send me the mailer so they can examine the thing in person because he has to spend an hour with me on the phone…

…and in the middle of it all, he hangs up on me.

No doubt an accident, but I haven’t received a phone call or an email from anyone hoping to resume that conversation, nor will I receive one, and I surely am not going to call them and start the Tech Support for Macbook Pro script all over again.

Thanks Steve.  Real winner, here.  Glad I sold AAPL.

I set out to write about something completely different, but I ran across this article:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08266/914029-298.stm

Or to quote:

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials say they want to give struggling children a chance, but the district is raising eyebrows with a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work.

Even more disconcerting are the willful delusions:

The district and union insist the policy still holds students accountable for performance.

I skipped the first… month… of Calculus I in college.  By the time I elected to arrive, half of the class had withdrawn because it was too difficult.  By the end of the semester, there were only 2 or 3 of us remaining.  I spoke with the professor at the end and complained that the class was too easy, that we hardly covered 1/4 of the available textbook, that in short I had learned almost nothing.

He directed me to a filing cabinet.  6′ tall, old and damaged and intimidating, many drawers, each of them literally stuffed to overflowing with papers.  This, he said, was the lesson plan and coursework he used 30 years previous.  We weren’t even making a dent in a single folder from that filing cabinet.

Why?  Because he had a quota of students to pass.  If he didn’t meet this quota, it meant he was a poor teacher (he was in fact excellent), it meant he taught at a poor school (eh), it meant students would not attend and grants would not be made and so on and so on and he watered it down and watered it down and it didn’t matter at all.

This “Post Gazette” story is the same stupidity driven by an entitlement culture born of that diseased misunderstanding that festers in the American psyche, that “All men are created equal” meant something contrary to the blatant facts of reality.

People “deserve” to pass.  People “deserve” to graduate.  Even if we have to reduce the standards to ensure that we don’t leave any lowest common denominators behind to do it.

Instead of improving education, or hell, instead of even recognizing that some people just aren’t very good at some things and nothing will change that, or any of a number of other things that could be done without ensuring the death of a nation

It’s not new, and that Calculus story is almost 20 years old (*sigh*), but the “50% Minimum” is so shockingly inconceivable I had to spout off about it.

I am tired of writing about Virtual Box, but they have given me an early birthday present.

Virtual Box 2.0 dropped today.  Now I have my 64 bit guests AND apparently the lockup under OS X was a VBox defect of some sort or other, because it does not occur under 2.0.

Now if only the Windows “AMD64″ installer (ie: for the 64 bit host) would execute I might actually be able to use this thing for something serious.  Either it dislikes Intel CPUs or dislikes 32 bit Vista; VMWare doesn’t care, and neither do I, so VBox loses again.

So I gave up and tried 32 bit guests, just for the sake of testing and comparing.

I finally managed to get VBox functional on OS X.  Installed Ubuntu and discovered that I can lock up the VM at will by “ls -lR /”.  This only happens under OS X and actually reinforces my suspicion that my Macbook Pro has a hardware problem.  But maybe VBox is buggy on that platform.  I switched to Windows as the host OS for reliability (…)

I decided to try OpenSolaris (for the first time) under VBox.  I have a long-standing hatred of Solaris’ installation procedure and “user experience”, and have to say that Sun/We/Gaia are going very much in the right direction with this.  Gnu userland utilities would probably cause me to switch to OpenSolaris on my *desktop*, never mind the server.

Ubuntu “server” seemed to have mostly similar performance between VMware Server and VirtualBox.  Ubuntu “desktop” was dramatically better under VirtualBox (and, to continue gushing, Gnome under OpenSolaris/VBox was also dramatically better than Unbuntu/Gnome/VMware).  For whatever reason, Ubuntu/Gnome/VMware is too slow for usability.

So, all in all a mostly positive experience.  I need to investigate whether my Macbook is fubar (very likely), and Sun/We/Gaia need to enable 64 bit guests.  As I’m doing rather important things in my VMs, I confess that I will continue to trust VMware more for at least the near future.

They definitely have some competition, however.  And that’s good for virtualization.