Susi & Rolli |
Everyone's familiar with the advertisements that land in the mailbox. Often, they're leaflets about specialty stores with deliberately low intelligence and tight budgets, offering extensive information about computers and other electronic toys. Sometimes, though, I get the vague impression that electronics is being confused with automotive technology. The masculine obsession with high-performance vehicles, whose ground clearance rivals the IQ of their drivers, is metaphorically transferred to technology that was originally conceived solely as office equipment. Another extreme is the evolution of human emotions into a machine, which, as in real life, leads to outright overreactions of frustration when disappointed, which can have lasting consequences for both sides.
I don't want to participate in this "arms race," especially since my individual configuration will be standard here in a few years at the latest and is thus more or less "just" ordinary. Therefore, here's a slightly different overview of how the technology works and the experiences I've gained in using it any similarities to current situations or people are unintentional and would be purely coincidental....
It's like the fairy tale of the two royal children Mac and Windows can't get along a rumor well-perpetuated, especially by the industry; everyone is supposed to buy the products of each system. From a programming perspective, that may be true*but ultimately, what's more important are the results of working with the programs: the data. Both systems had a few surprises regardly.
If they were placed directly next to each other, at least one of them wouldn't need to go swimming or diving, to return to the parable of these children. On the other hand, putting the technology together required a lot of preparatory work and information, which made me, the old user, feel a bit of a slur.
First, allow me to introduce briefly: Susi, tall and short-legged, while Rolli, on the other hand, is stocky and heavy, and at 30 kg, he's almost on the overweight side. Accordingly, he looks out at the world with a goggle-eyed expression (20 inches), while Susi, with her squinty eyes (17 inches), doesn't like anything bright. Because she avoids the sun for this reason, she's a bit pale like the other gray office mice, whereas Rolli is a bit vain and values his well-designed appearance. A mesh-patterned aluminum casing clearly distinguishes him from Susi; it's obvious, just like in the animal kingdom, where the male usually has the brighter plumage. On the other hand, he's nice and quiet at work. With his seven fans under the table, he only starts to wheeze when he has to perform heavy work like encoding videos or burning DVDs. But then you want to leave it alone, even though it has the power of two 2 GHz cores - it's all it can handle. Susi, with her slower alternative core (AMD, 1.3 GHz), chatters away for dear life, and the single fan doesn't distinguish whether work is being done or the screensaver is running. When it comes to her inner workings, however, she's very reserved, often feigning activity and only opening up when she's got more than a screw loose. Rolli, on the other hand, has nothing to hide; his tidy interior, accessible without tools, shows that it's just calculating with current.
Although from different worlds, each with a distinctive appearance, they live harmoniously side by side: on the right Susi (with wheels) - on the left Rolli (without wheels), who feels somewhat handicapped by this. |
Since, as in any network, the clear assignment of units is very important, both attach importance to a tidy environment. Susi is quite unimaginative in this regard and, in her obsession with slimness, only knows drives A through I (with a total of 40 GB). Rolli, on the other hand, in latent omnipotence, has created an entire world of his own where on Earth, normal startup and work take place (160 GB), experiments are carried out in Hell (250 GB), and completed projects are stored in Shangri-la (200 GB), for example, by normal crazy people playing with trains, or system backups are stored as backups for rainy days.
Meanwhile (2010), the number of external hard drives has grown to approximately 15 with a total data capacity of approximately 5 TB. Considering that NASA only had 2 TB of hard drive space available for its first moon mission in 1969, you can only shake your head at the paranoid nature of this ossified user, who wants to keep a current backup of his data even on the toilet.
Rolli, with 4.5 GB of RAM, can take a deep breath and flex his muscles, whereas Susi, with 256 MB, is a downright delicate device who can have her hair blow-dried whenever Rolli takes a breath. Nevertheless, Susi, with her watery swill, is always threatening Rolli not to slow down. She may be quite intelligent, but with her IDE bus she can be a bit slow on the uptake from time to time, whereas Rolli, with his 1 GHz bus speed on the PCI-X bus and 64-bit processing bandwidth, is a pretty speedy little fellow. When processing system signals, Susi still struggles with her pie-slice principle known as IRQs, familiar from the old DOS days. She takes a bite of everything, often swallowing something and realizing that this isn't good for her figure in the long run. Rolli, on the other hand, doesn't care; according to the UNIX concept, every peripheral device is just a "file" that provides data. It's "pinned" to the system, and should a component ever malfunction it will be "torn off" it's remounted without dragging the system into oblivion.
As a cosmopolitan woman Susi is blonde and a little bit bitchy. Despite an established connection via knight Bluetooth she constantly complains to Rolli when exchanging files because he keeps sending her files she supposedly doesn't know, true to the motto "What do I care about the crap I said yesterday - today is today." Rolli, however, no longer gets upset by this, but tolerates it with stoic composure - he lets Susi babble on and sends her through anyway. Strangely(?) there are no problems the other way around - why should there be? Men are said to sometimes have fewer communication problems when the government, i.e., "mistress," has something important to say. Only when she's put on the network leash does she work smoothly with Rolli. No wonder - in her old, tight-fitting Windows 98 SE dress, combined with her meager memory, she seems a bit short-winded and inflexible, but more than 512 MB is proven to be inappropriate (see here). A new outfit like Windows XP doesn't suit her because of her AV Master 2000's driver allergy to the latest haute couture from Redmond, not to mention that the calcified user is also quite stingy. Due to the enormous size of this card, she's very picky about choosing her apartment and doesn't like having any other card as a neighbor. She only recognizes new technology after time-consuming and irritating installation procedures, which can lead to arguments with the neighbor or the caretaker due to device conflicts; with Rolli, it's enough to plug in and go. Susi adorns herself with a multitude of connection cables - numerous cables (16) connect her and components to the outside world, whereas Rolli is content with a minimum (10) and instead emphasizes sensible combinations like DVI)
A look inside Rolli. Not only does it look very tidy, the sophisticated design was also evident in the recent installation of a second hard drive (top right). Rolli already had the necessary mounting screws and connecting cables on board. Installation therefore only took about 3 minutes. |
During normal operation, Susi, being an egocentric person, sometimes overestimates her capabilities, then retreats into herself and doesn't want to know absolutely anything about the dull outside world at all. After a reset alarm goes off, it always takes a few minutes for her to use "Scandisk" to determine that she's still "all there"; a time that Rolli uses as an opportunity to take a short nap or check the mailbox. He then sifts out any trash that could be unhealthy for Susi. Since it has become very dangerous there, Susi is no longer allowed out alone she could easily catch a viral cold or need a deworming treatment afterwards. Therefore, the calcified user only lets her out with Rolli. Rolli, however, proves to be a gentleman and keeps the firewall umbrellla open. This way, Susi doesn't need to carry an additional screen when she goes online and can shop to her heart's content, even in places where the visit could sometimes have unpleasant financial consequences. Since she loves large, expensive things that Rolli can't do anything with, or would have to buy a version for his environment at a high price, and for which Susi would be squandering a lot of money, it's always up to Rolli to find similar things that he and she can use to create something useful, or that are freeware for both (NeoOffice / OpenOffice / Gimp für Mac OSX bzw. Windows).
At first, Susi has the opinion that if it costs nothing, it's worthless. She's since become more comfortable with these freeware programs, but the calcified user sometimes sweats like a pig. She fed Rolli canned food in the form of Starwriter files (version 2.0) from the early 1990s without having to pour them through a filter sieve first. Rolli can even enjoy this sometimes hard-to-digest, tiny soft cheese in *.wmv, *.doc, or *.pps formats without hiccups or diarrhea. However, every now and then Rolli chokes and has to unexpectedly quit a program, but thanks to sensible memory management, he doesn't have to suddenly run to the bathroom like Susi, who has to start all over again after a strong, violating cough maybe she should have learned something proper.
The third in the group is Leppi, a Powerbook G4, nice and small and flat, making it possible to work in places Susi and Rolli can't reach with all their cables. Its birth was somewhat difficult the motherboard was defective and it had to be returned to Great Britain for a short treatment. Now recovered, it edits pictures, music, and films just like Rolli and Susi. However, it communicates with Rolli almost blindly, with a kind of telepathy that, under normal conditions, extends up to 50 meters. Now (2010), after four years of hard use, it has been converted into a media center. A new hard drive, which costs a pittance at best, creates enough space for videos, self-produced films, all kinds of music from classical about nu jazz through pop. Leppi can even play HDV videos, albeit with a puffed-out cheek. For a computer whose technical design dates back to the last century, this is a powerful performance. This would mean that Windows 98 with a Pentium III would have to be able to play HDV on DVI - at this point, the die-hard Windows user might realize that his system might not be quite up to date.
"Lolli" has now become a mobile editing computer, powered by two 3.06 GHz cores, a sufficiently large hard drive, and the advantages of a new system the Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6). Network-wise, it can be integrated even more easily than its predecessors, Rolli and Leppi in the Finder (comparable to the file manager in Windows), in addition to conveniently browsing video files using Coverflow, there's also a small button for capturing the screen of a known computer on the network sort of en passant...
Every educational institution, every café, or even just the home garden that has Wi-Fi offers him the opportunity to connect with other computers. Only Susi obviously doesn't take him seriously - to her, it's just a boy's toy anyway. Configuring the network with Rolli took just 10 minutes, 9 of which were due to the calcified user's slowness - no wonder - true friendship only exists between men, after all. If Susi wants to visit Rolli, he has to wave an expensive rose, and she, being a suspicious creature, first checks whether it's really a rose from his garden. This calcified user would never have thought of the trick of creating an account on the Windows computer identical to the one on the PowerMac. On the other hand, she's less fussy when junk from the internet tries to access her files, which can quickly result in her catching a bad cold. It's cute, though, when Susi searches the internet for her lolli - computers are only human, after all.
Besides Susi, Rolli, Lolli, and Leppi, there's also the "mini" computer Trude, who in normal life is a cell phone (iPhone 4), but always has to whine and connect to things where only adults normally talk which is why she's regularly on Lolli's phone. However, she's already big enough to connect to the internet via Wi-Fi. Thanks to a GPS module and Google Maps, Trude always knows where she is unlike this calcified user, who is obviously increasingly suffering from Alzheimer's. So, someone always finds their way home. (-;
The other devices, such as cameras, video recorders, and stereo systems, feed Leppi, Rolli, Lolli, and Susi with moving and still images and sounds, or the three of them can them on round silver discs or cassettes. Susi's good old SCSI interface holds a special position in this regard, as it makes her slim and fast, even in the age of Firewire. Her two drives aren't exactly easy to handle thanks to the SCSI connection. If she shakes them, Rolli's intelligence quickly slips into the Superdrive. Well... guys... (-;
Susi is into older men and enjoys looking at good photos with her many-year-old Methuselah Scanner, something Rolli can only do with the help of a video camera. She likes that Rolli is so good with moving images and uses his skills to convert clips into other video codecs, which she would have to laboriously download from the internet and slow her down when walking. She has the invaluable advantage over Rolli of being able to digitize old video footage from analog sources, which, however, causes her more headaches than she'd like. What's more, thanks to her old serial port, she's even able to read/configure the telephone system, garden railway layout and dive computer, something Rolli can't do at all due to a lack of software. In her self-confidence, bordering on arrogance, that she's now the only true Windows computer, this ossified user quickly brings her back down to earth, because now they both have to work... Susi? Suuusi? Suuuuuusiiii??? So let's start again: screwdriver - reset button....
As far as much for the fairytale world (-; . I'm not denying that Windows also offers a number of powerful tools for video processing; however, I was horrified by the idea of having to check the system integrity every time I started a video project, true to the modified advertising slogan: "Are you still tinkering or are you already working?" While it may be that the current Windows has become a stable system, ultimately it's usually the component in front of the screen that drives a system into the abyss anyway. In this respect, "Susi" is and will remain a reliable tool for the foreseeable future. However, I must admit that I've been living a much more relaxed and peaceful life since the sensitive data is safely stored with Rolli and Susi only has to take care of the "little things." I was tired of constantly having to play the guinea pig for the company from Redmond, a decision that, at best, causes incomprehension among some Windows users, as a typical conversation from those days shows:
With this answer, I will finally bring down the questioner's narrow-gauge computer universe, which he had painstakingly learned from computer newspapers. Not that I would intentionally cause this (or if I did, then only a little bit (-; ), but for the majority of computer users, it seems like the end of the world. Sure, a user who can handle their (faulty) system because you can work with errors, even if the error is Windows (-; ;) is still better off than someone who has absolutely no grasp of it the ability to handle this technology today, more than ever, determines the success or failure of one's professional and personal development.
But it's simply not enough to stock up on cheap hardware from normal food stores and you discover that it doesn't do what you want to in the long run, and ultimately blame it on the environment. Taking time for this complicated technology, even fiddling around with it and experimenting, are apparently foreign concepts in today's hectic world. You bought it cheaply, and now you want it to work, no matter how.
But being cheap isn't always geil (cool - I hate that advertising slogan!), so I'll grant everyone those necessary (expensive) hours of maintenance from a PC emergency service on their own computer. Performance and the associated time should be paid for in the age of the gay *ahem* eBay society, this is almost an anachronism. Ultimately, everyone who wants to use it will have to ask themselves: How much computer do I actually need to complete my daily tasks? Some people don't need a computer at all, which I accept. But in that case, does it have to be the hyperduper super system with a graphics card, supersonic fans for gaming, with its own small nuclear power plant in the front yard, where even loading the operating system requires a forklift as a necessary system requirement? Or is a simple, small computer sufficient, one that reliably lets me complete my professional/personal tasks, access to the internet and communication with other people, because I can easily master all its features In this context, it should be remembered that this technology was originally just a typewriter!
This fundamental experience led me to the conclusion that Windows, with all its versions, is actually just an endless waste of resources. The current generation of computers running Windows Vista requires memory and graphics cards whose idle performance is comparable to that of a small space heater(!). These "bad habits" should be eliminated as soon as possible to save energy, not to mention the sometimes untraceable errors that send unsaved work to data nirvana at the most inopportune moment. My pivotal experience in this regard was the second Schkeuditz film in 2003, where Windows, or rather the registry, completely crashed during editing (driver error). Only sensible data organization (at some point, you had to learn something like that (-; ) ensured that the uploaded video clips and editing files were not affected - three weeks of intensive work would have been in vain otherwise. But nevertheless, despite the backup, it took a whole weekend and cost a few gray hairs until all the connected devices were working smoothly again. So it was high time to think outside the box, which wasn't easy at first. Every so-called "computer expert" thought they knew the world of Apple - there's hardly any software there, and anyway, they'll be bankrupt soon anyway - and in this thicket of prejudices and half-knowledge, it wasn't easy to develop a reasonably meaningful position.
The development of Vista as a typewriter with top-of-the-line graphics (article in german - formerly known as "Longhorn") and immense hardware requirements, however, made me suspicious does anyone still work in this country, given that so many gaming consoles have to be built? This impression is, to say the least, highly misleading. This is probably why the astonishment/horror of someone who is only used to Windows is so immense when I tell them that I work with a nibbled apple and not play. Considering the multitude of malware on Windows systems, this should by now jolt even the most die-hard Windows user out of their complacency and cause them to search for alternatives to handle everyday tasks (office, graphics, video, internet) without outside interference. At least, besides the well-known alternative of Linux/Apache, there are a wide variety of operating system alternatives. For this reason alone, the thorough cut of the system change, which I had hesitated before for a long time and which I spent two years torturing salespeople in Apple stores (-; ), should be consistent and leave no back door open anywhere that could invite a break-in.
Monocultures, however convenient they may seem at first glance, are unhealthy in the long run; a wisdom long known in agriculture (in german). Even referring to standards doesn't help, Microsoft sometimes doesn't even adhere to its own or tries to impose new, proprietary ones. In my experience Openoffice for example, opened old Word files without any problems, something the current version of Word struggled with. Apple, on the other hand, strictly adheres to existing standards also my own experience after several years of DVD creation. In the meantime, there have been three different versions of Windows Media Player, whose files have had some difficulties interoperating.
But as long as market share is confused with standards or security, in my opinion, nothing will change in Microsoft's "resistance to learning" moving from a secretive, error-prone uniformity to a diversity solidified by open debate, where critical errors can be quickly identified and eliminated. On the contrary, I even consider it dangerous, because it enables the easy synchronization of opinions and the invasion of people's privacy (George Orwell sends his regards!). And precisely this privacy should remain protected, according to Article 10 of the german constitution even in the age of information technology.
Another aspect touches on the sensitive area of computer-generated works. To be clear, I'm not a fan of pirated copies or anything like that, and I do care about ensuring that authors receive the money they've hard-earned through their intellectual work. However, I do see the danger that software patents or the creation of proprietary product standards (wmv = video file for Windows?I consider this a typical example) could appropriate knowledge and documents that belong to the common good of humanity. Want a small example? No problem.
Here, it's just a simple instruction manual, but things are more critical when it comes to documentation or other important texts. To be clear here - I want to pay money for the use of the tool, not for the use of the workpiece created with it. T For this reason alone, as mentioned above, my sympathy and support go to open source projects where people who can't afford, for example, an operating system or office suite from Microsoft are given tools and can participate in the world's electronic knowledge. Mac OS, Rolli's operating system, for example, is based on the open source Darwin operating system - a key argument for buying the not-so-cheap Rolli. Well, you say I don't need such an expensive computer and open source is just for weirdos anyway. Okay - then you should also imagine this page away - it was created entirely based on open source information...
If, after reading this admittedly not-so-easy manuscript, you still have questions about this or that technical term, I recommend Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that is also open source (-;
* I'm deliberately not discussing VPC (Virtual PC) here, an emulator for Windows operating systems on Mac OS. This emulator enables the limited operation of Windows programs on an Apple computer, with the emphasis on "limited." The question here is: Who would seriously want to install a moped engine into a Porsche and then park it against the next lamppost when parking? I don't want to mess around with my computer, tinker with it, play games, show off, or anything like that; I want to, as I said above, work.
A new development is the implementation of Intel chips. Using Boot Camp or Parallels, it's now possible to run two operating systems on one Mac. This has even gone so far that "Parallels" allows programs from alternative operating systems to be launched from the Dock, and this dual boot will be included as a feature in the next version of Mac OSX, "Leopard" or "Snow Leopard." However, one should be under no illusion as to the importance of Windows for Apple (the people from Cupertino provide no support for the messiness of their colleagues from Redmond) - not without a cheeky side glance at the sometimes questionable conditions in the American penal system known by the above-mentioned name, which in this case is used to drive out the bad manners (= Windows) of naughty computers like Susi.... (-;x
Some remarks at 2025: In the meantime, the technical equipment had been changed substantially. New devices or software, respectively, came into use but Susi and Rolli are still alive and do their homework (-; Compared to conditions of today their work is done leisurely but it fits to the calcified user - he is now a pensioner too (-;
© Bahnrolli made 04/08/2011 edited 08/13/2025 | Sitemap