(no subject)

[katsmeat]

My inner latent morbid Goth Girl has just gone into ecstasies after reading this...

Carnivorous Plant Eats Mouse in French Botanical Garden

Who needs a cat when a French Audrey II's on the case? Now I just need to find my scrapbook full of Polaroids of roadkill and print the story to paste it in.

< /blatant stereotyping >

Macbook vs Macbook Pro



Thoughts...

• Assuming academic discount on all. All loaded with 2Gb of memory (SO-DIMM's bought from Crucal - cheaper than Apple). Total costs:
  - 2 Ghz MacBook - £943
  - 2 Ghz MacBook Pro - £1359
  - 2.16 Ghz MacBook Pro - £1514
• Graphics:
  Macbook - Intel GMA 950 - CRAP!
  MB Pro - ATI-X1600, though would need to pay bigbigbucks for 256 on the 2.16 Pro; there's only 128Mb on the 2Ghz Pro.
• Do I care about graphics? I don't do video or photo stuff so no reason other than gaming. The last game I was heavily into was Quake 2 sometime in the late 90's. It's probably best to squirt the Call of Duty 2 demo onto a Regular MB I have access to and see what it actually looks like. And remember one loaded to the gills with memory ought to do much better.
  
  - Yes I'm probably not fussed about the latest and greatest graphics. But this thing's got to have about 5 years of usage in it. Is it a good idea to buy one that's underspeced even now?
  
  - They're just games! It's either an extra £300 or an extra £500 and you're that desperate, buy yourself a fricking X-box; they're only about 40 quid these days.
  
• Likes the case design and the general look of the Regular much better than the Pro. < goes weak at the knees at the thought of magnetic latches >. The Pro's in the old Powerbook G4 case and looks a bit bleah! It has the air of being a quick'n'dirty kludge. Albeit a very very powerful kludge.
  
• Current Mac laptops aren't easily DVD milti-regioned. Unlike PC laptops... but they're PC's. Also, I own exactly one region-1 DVD.
• Other stuff - Slightly bigger HD on the Pro 80 or 100 - though an easy and cheapish upgrade on the Regular... a bigger screen on the Pro but a bulkier machine - I already carry enough crap around.
• The pro doesn't come with the Big-Bang board game suite and I've kind've developed the hots for the
  Moon-goddess. Although, admittedly, she does play an appallingly inept game of backgammon.

Any resemblances between this and another very big dilemma I have right now, are purely coincidental.
< shrugs >